Would Socialism Fix Tanking?

The NBA is supposedly investigating the Dallas Mavericks for their blatant tank job this weekend, when they sat Kyrie Irving for the whole game, and Luka Doncic for three quarters of it, even though they were still mathematically in contention for this year’s play-in tournament. But nothing is likely to come from this investigation — as David Aldridge wrote at The Athletic, the Mavs weren’t doing anything that teams across the league do every year. It seems like the NBA only felt forced to act because Dallas’ implosion was particularly high-profile: The Mavericks made the Western Conference Finals last year, and expectations around the team were high after trading for Irving in February. Plus, the team did it in a particularly blatant fashion, which is just embarrassing for the league.

But this led me to consider the titular question of this post: Would socialism fix tanking?

To answer this, we need a proper definition of “tanking”; often, fans use that term to refer to any team that sucks. If a team is not in playoff contention, or not expected to be in playoff contention going into the season, then they are thought to be “tanking.” This isn’t really fair — there’s a place for teams that are trying to rebuild and develop young talent for future seasons. The term “tanking” ought to be reserved for teams that are intentionally trying to lose, in order to acquire more favorable draft positioning, and not just teams that aren’t ready to win.

Of course, that line isn’t always so simple. Indeed, in the last decade or so, as owners and GMs have embraced terms like “process” and “competitive window,” they have used the same rationale that justifies tanking — “we are losing now in service of winning later” — to justify extending the period of cost-saving “rebuilding” longer and longer. Indeed, in baseball specifically, where the CBA does not guarantee workers a specific share of the revenues, a lot of what we — myself included! — refer to as “tanking” is really just wage suppression. When teams like the 2011-2013 Astros or the Nationals and A’s right now, intentionally lose 100+ games for extended periods, they are not really doing it to jockey for draft positioning. They are just cutting labor costs so that ownership can pocket money, with the “promise” that they will then spend the money when the team is more competitive.

This is certainly a problem, and one that could be addressed by socialism, or even just a demand in collective bargaining for players to get a specific proportion of the revenues, as other leagues have done. But for now I’m concerned with a more narrowly defined kind of tanking, like what Dallas was doing this weekend: Intentionally losing late in the season to better position yourself for the draft.

This is harder to address, because it’s not as clear-cut an example of owners putting their own interests ahead of players. Here, for example, the Mavericks made a pretty straightforward, rational decision: Making the play-in tournament is a nice accomplishment, but you’re pretty unlikely to make a deep playoff run from that position (only one team seeded 7 or lower has ever made the NBA Finals, and that was the Knicks during the lockout-shortened 1998-99 season). On the other hand, the Mavericks were in the unusual position of losing their pick completely if they made the playoffs (thanks to the Kristaps Porzingis trade in 2019), or keeping it and having a slim but real chance of getting the #1 overall pick (likely to be particularly valuable this year, thanks to Victor Wembanyama) if they missed the playoffs. In that scenario, it’s not beneficial to the owner to lose. It’s probably beneficial to the franchise. In other words, even if the Dallas Mavericks were a publicly owned utility, they likely would have made the same choice. So it seems like socialism would NOT fix tanking….

EXCEPT! See, the root of this problem is the draft. The whole reason that losing can be in a team’s interest is that every pro sports league grants the worst teams the ability to select first from the amateur talent entering the workforce. This is such a common arrangement that we rarely even remark on how crazy it is: Imagine if the top graduates of the nation’s best medical schools could get drafted by the worst hospitals in the country, and then forced to work there if they wanted to practice their profession.

Fans often think that drafts exist for the sake of competitive balance, to ensure that bad teams have a chance to improve and that the best teams don’t get too dominant. I’m dubious this was ever true, but it certainly isn’t in an era of salary caps and luxury taxes. Those tools maintain competitive balance far more directly than amateur drafts. If anything, as the tanking discourse shows, drafts often undermine competitive balance by incentivizing some teams to lose.

Whatever the overall effect on competitive balance, the dominant effect of drafts is to suppress the bargaining power of new players entering the league by ensuring that they cannot offer their labor to the highest bidder — only to the team that has the opportunity to draft them. This is a major power imbalance, in favor of the owners. It’s not just that it suppresses rookie salaries, although it does do that.* The real issue is that it severely restricts the player’s ability to control his own destiny. If he can’t chose his employer, then what incentive does the employer have to be an attractive place to work?

*It’s worth noting here that there are legitimate reasons to want to cap the salaries of unproven, amateur talent (*cough* JaMarcus Russell *cough*), and high draft picks are not underpaid, exactly. This is why socialism is not just about money, but about redistributing POWER to the working class.

In a system that respected the autonomy of players more than the power of owners (like, say, socialism), there would be no drafts. Victor Wembanyama would be free to choose which team he wanted to play for based on what was right for him — who would pay him the most, where he wanted to live, which coworkers and boss he would have, etc. — like all free workers. 

And this, presumably, would eliminate tanking. After all, it’s hard to imagine any young player wanting to join a team that embarrassed itself like the Mavericks just did. And to those who say, “Wait, but then wouldn’t every rookie just join the best teams?” Well, that’s what salary caps and roster limits are for. Dominant teams still couldn’t suck up all the talent; it’s just that teams wouldn’t have to debase themselves through the process of tanking to get young talent. Quite the opposite: To attract new players, a team would have to demonstrate some potential.

Is this the main reason to support socialism? Probably not, but it illustrates that if you trace most problems back far enough, you eventually run into the problem of private ownership, i.e. the problem of capitalism.