John Hollinger

Yes, you can tank for the lottery pick, but the other thing you do is shut down veteran players because you don't want them to play anymore, basically.

Not just from a tanking perspective, but from an injury prevention perspective.

And so those teams just descend into awfulness either way.

And so I think they've done a lot to address those things.

And we've definitely settled on tanking as the best way to improve a bad team.

Every bad team has relied on that for years now.

So is that the only way to improve a bad team?

I mean, I think that remains...

an open question.

I mean, you look at Brooklyn, they had no picks.

They had probably the worst rebuilding situation in history, and they still built themselves up to a playoff team before Katie and Kyrie arrived.

You look at Indiana last year, they did, they, they were able to do a middle build with no tanking and were one game from the championship.

Several of the best players of the last several years were not high draft picks.

When you look at

Giannis, Joker, even Curry, Thompson, Draymond, not a top five pick among them.

So yes, it was like given the option, if I was running a team, yes, I would tank given the incentives that were in place.

But there are other ways to do this without tanking.

And would they be as likely to be successful as just a straight tank?

Probably not.

But we know that there are other ways to bake this pie.