It’s the talk of the NBA town. In a year where SGA and the Thunder are looking to repeat, Wemby and the Spurs are looking to break through, and Cade Cunningham and the Pistons could be firing come playoff time, all anyone in the basketball world can talk about is how to prevent the dregs of the league from intentionally losing in order to protect draft capital.
It’s kind of a bummer! But the prominence of the conversation at least apparently has the league looking to take action. ESPN’s Shams Charania reported on Wednesday that a vote is set for a meeting of the Board of Governors on May 28 that could see some of the anti-tanking measures that the league has already floated put into place.
Will those measures work? That is another question entirely. Charania said that the leading idea heading into the meeting was a flattening of the lottery odds. While that may prevent teams at the bottom-half of the standings from tanking all the way to the dregs of the league, it could also motivate teams in the hunt for a spot in the play-in tournament to try and drop out of the postseason. They would almost certainly see a shot at the No. 1 pick as far more valuable than playing two must-win games on the road for the right to get swept in the first round.
Luckily for the NBA, noted problem solver Draymond Green has an idea. And it’s a pretty good one! Green’s pitch to stop tanking was prompted after a particularly egregious bit of gamesmanship the Kings pulled against the Warriors on Tuesday night. With the Kings leading by one with three minutes to play, they elected to intentionally foul Seth Curry, sending him to the line. The puzzlement of the broadcast team is a good indicator of just how strange the sequence was.
The Kings were INTENTIONALLY fouling Seth Curry in crunch time to lose the game...
— BrickCenter (@BrickCenter_) April 8, 2026
We've NEVER seen this level of tanking 😭 pic.twitter.com/fU9q7d4JEV
The Kings say the intentional foul was a mistake, with the team attempting to stop the clock and take a timeout before the three-minute mark, and not realizing the Warriors were in the bonus. The league is reportedly looking into the matter.
But Green, who was on the court during the sequence, isn’t buying it, and said as much after the game while pitching his solution.
"I get fined when I do wrong," Green said on Tuesday. "Just fine the hell outta people. They love taking money from players. Keep fining teams. I've seen two fines. As players, they snatch that money in a heartbeat. Why isn't it the same? Everybody love money."
Fines are simple, and if properly harsh, can be effective
Green is right at least three times in the above quote, and probably more: 1) He gets fined when he does wrong, 2) He’s seen two fines and 3) Everybody love money.
Earlier this season, the NBA levied two fines at least tangentially related to tanking—hitting the Jazz and Pacers for $500,000 and $100,000 respectively. The Jazz fine was for “conduct detrimental to the league,” while the Pacers were hit with a lesser penalty related to the league’s Player Participation Policy.
While a single fine is not going to prevent any team from tanking, Green might be on to something with his simplified system of punishment.
As things stand, the league’s potential fixes for the tanking problem range from the “extremely simple and likely ineffective” (flattening the lottery odds) to the “so complicated it’s hard to game out what the effects will be but still likely ineffective” (freezing the lottery odds at a date that is held secret by the league).
Conversely, fines are a language that every team in the league knows well. And while monetary fines can only go so far—if the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class—there are other ways to fine teams.
Fine a team’s draft pick. Tanking too hard for a better pick? Surprise, no pick at all! A half-measure before that could be to fine a team's future cap space, though that likely opens up a can of worms for someone smarter than myself to figure out. Maybe we knock off a few of the team’s home games the following season, which directly digs into a team’s revenue. Let’s get creative folks!
The point here is that any fine—be it money, cap space, draft picks or anything else—is a material punishment that could actively work to dissuade teams from tanking. We can mess around with the lottery system all we want, but the easiest way to end tanking cannot be eliminating the motivation to do so, because the motive is going to exist. We know just how valuable a top draft pick can be. It feels like it would be far easier to punish teams found to be tanking hard enough that the motivation to tank is outweighed by the punishment of getting caught.
I admit that this leads to the unenviable problem of deciding who will be serving as the league’s Tank Police and how their justice is served, but the league seemed fine fining the Jazz and Pacers earlier this year. What’s a little more?
When it comes to crime and punishment in the NBA, leave it to Draymond Green to see with clear eyes.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Draymond Green Has a Simple Pitch to Solve Tanking. It Might Also Be the Most Effective..
