In Praise of Tanking?

Posted by Zach Lowe on Sep 3, 2009 31803 commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fcelticshub.com%2F2009%2F09%2F03%2Fin-praise-of-tanking%2FIn+Praise+of+Tanking%3F+2009-09-03+14%3A43%3A39Zach+Lowehttp%3A%2F%2Fcelticshub.com%2F%3Fp%3D3180

I don’t have time today to take a detailed look back at the Spurs 1996-7 campaign, but I remember media openly discussed the fact that the Spurs didn’t exactly rush David Robinson, Sean Elliott and others back from injury as their record got worse and worse.

And then comes this excerpt from the San Antonio Express-News in a longer piece (worth reading, for sure) about the Admiral’s upcoming Hall of Fame induction:

A little more than a year later, Robinson threw out his back, then broke his foot, forcing him to sit and watch for the last 31/2 months of the 1996-97 season.

A frightful, 62-loss disaster ensued.

“Ridiculous,” Robinson said, recalling the year in which most of the Spurs’ front-line players went down with injuries. “It was a mess.”

It was also the start of something divine. The Spurs won the lottery in 1997 and claimed the No. 1 draft pick, power forward Tim Duncan.

Duncan has since led the Spurs to four NBA titles.

-snip- (TM Rob Neyer)

“That was a loss that was a win,” former Spurs guard Avery Johnson said. “It’s amazing when you lose and you’re winning at the same time. When you’re going through it, you don’t even recognize it.”

The Celtics (15-67) and the Grizz were actually worse than San Antonio that season, and I think we’d all admit the C’s were not trying their best to win games once the season became hopeless. All of the bottom-feeders had Duncan in mind, and they adjusted their rotations and commitment to winning accordingly.

There have been all sorts of proposals—some decent, some ridiculous—about how the league can prevent an annual race to the bottom. Should the league abandon the lottery in favor of an NFL-style system in which the worst team gets the first pick? Go back to the coin flip system it used until the Ewing draft in the mid-1980s, in which the two worst teams would flip a coin to determine who picked first? Should every NBA team be involved in the lottery, as Malcolm Gladwell suggested?

I don’t know what the answer is, but I know that 1997 season was among the most tankalicious in league history.