Victor Wembanyama is perhaps the best player to enter the NBA Draft since LeBron James, and as such, several teams have gone out of their way to position themselves to possibly pick him. Teams like the San Antonio Spurs and Utah Jazz traded veterans with the apparent goal of increasing their lottery odds, while other young teams like the Rockets and Thunder merely avoided adding veterans so as to avoid improving in the year he was available. In other words, teams were tanking.
Tanking is standard NBA procedure. It's also an idea Wembanyama himself struggles to understand.
"Tanking? It's a weird strategy," Wembanyama said in French in a recent interview with French newspaper Le Parisien. "I find it unreasonable, and I try not to think about it. I also heard that the NBA considered changing a few rules for me, but that doesn't concern me."
The NBA did recently change its rule to make tanking less beneficial, but it did so before Wembanyama was even on the league's radar. The draft lottery used to offer the worst team in the NBA a 25 percent chance to land the No. 1 pick. As of 2019, those odds have been reduced to 14 percent.
That has curbed tanking to an extent, but so long as the league has any structure that incentives losing, teams are going to tank. A 14 percent chance at Wembanyama is effectively a 14 percent chance at half a decade of contention. If he is as good as the league expects him to be, he'll give his team several chances to win championships in the eight or nine years first-round draft picks tend to be committed to their original teams. If they manage those years correctly, they could have Wembanyama for more than a decade. The risk of sacrificing a year for a 14 percent chance at any player is high, but the reward is substantially higher.
