Thank you Ben for sending in this week’s take. Tanking in sports is a pretty heavy topic. Almost every major American sport has a draft, which means that almost every American sport experiences some form of tanking. For those who are unfamiliar, tanking is when a team doesn’t believe it can achieve major success in a season and instead tries to perform worse and lose more games to receive a better chance of a higher draft pick. The NFL probably has the most egregious examples of this tactic since there isn’t a lottery in their draft. Drafts usually only give a better chance depending on win percentage whereas, in the NFL, whichever team does worst gets the first pick. It is true that equity is a hard thing to keep in professional sports, and tanking seems to be inefficient at preventing an imbalance in teams. Focusing on the NBA, the Dallas Mavericks received the number one pick despite having a winning record and a less-than-one-percent chance of getting it, the San Antonio Spurs have received a top-five pick for the last three years despite having a winning record for two of them, and the Oklahoma City Thunder are likely going to receive a top-three pick this year despite having the best win record in the league. The better question is, does tanking even work in the first place? At the end of the day, bigger market teams are always going to have more assets and it’s almost impossible for them to need to tank. Throughout the entire history of the Boston Celtics, an organization that has existed for roughly 80 years, they’ve had three losing seasons, yet they’ve still had over 30 top-ten picks. The biggest issue people have with tanking is that it makes for a terrible watching experience; personally I don’t want to watch my favorite team try to lose all of their games, and as a New York Giants fan, I haven’t. I’m going to have to disagree with Ben’s take, partially because I hate watching teams play poorly and partially because it just doesn’t work. Really bad teams tend to stay really bad and really good teams rarely lose their status and if they do it doesn’t last long.