The Toronto Raptors aren’t new to losing. But they are new to whatever this is.

After taking over as the Raptors’ president of basketball operations in 2013, Masai Ujiri refused to embrace the blatant, in-your-face tanking that Sam Hinkie and the “process” Philadelphia 76ers were busy popularizing during that same era, instead opting to build from the middle. “I’m not sure the karma is great when you do stuff like that,” Ujiri said about tanking. “We’re not doing that here,” he later added.

The Raptors made history in 2019 by becoming the first team to win an NBA Championship without a single lottery pick. But after Toronto missed the playoffs in three of the last four seasons and were rewarded with just one top 10 draft pick, Ujiri finally decided to follow in a long line of teams who are taking advantage of the NBA’s incentive structure that means bad teams have better odds of landing a top pick in the draft.

Now, the Raptors find themselves in the middle of an embarrassing and unwatchable multi-team tank-off that has come to define the 2024-25 NBA season.

“As a purist of the league, a purist of basketball, we play every game to win,” 15-year veteran and vice-president of the National Basketball Players Association, Garrett Temple, tells the Guardian. “[But] the way the rules are set up, it’s advantageous to be the worst team in the league record-wise. I don’t think it’s a great look for the NBA.”

And the Raptors have given bad looks this season. After leading playoff-bound Orlando Magic by double digits in the fourth quarter on 4 March, Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic pulled the plug by sitting starters Immanuel Quickley, Scottie Barnes, Jakob Poeltl and RJ Barrett, leaving about $ 100m in salaries on the bench and less than $ 10m in rookies and two-way players on the floor. “All I could do was laugh,” Barrett said.

Related: ‘The food is bad, everything is bad’: what it feels like to be on a hopeless NBA team

While Rajakovic explained that “for us, it’s very, very important now to take a look at different players and young guys and to develop those guys, to give them important minutes,” the reality was that the Raptors were as close to the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings as they were to a playoff spot. Even though about a third of the regular season was still to be played at that point, the team had already decided to prioritize managing its lottery odds over making a push for the playoffs.

And they are not the only ones.

“Right now there are nine teams tanking,” one league executive told ESPN. “And next year’s draft is going to have maybe more franchise players than this year’s draft. A year from now, you may still have nine teams tanking.”

That’s almost one-third of the league that exists somewhere on a spectrum from being comfortable with mediocrity to coming up with increasingly creative ways to lose games. Teams are sitting their best players due to “rest” and quiet-quitting by pulling starters late in games, causing upwards of 20 star players to be in street clothes on any given night in March and April, making the quality of late-season basketball worse than ever.

“Teams can put whatever they want on their injury report, and the league has not policed injury reports,” NBA writer Brian Windhorst said on the Hoop Collective podcast. “So you have situations where guys are truly injured, but listed as out. And other situations where stars are not really injured, but they’re listed as out. And so the credibility is all over the place, and the league has let that go down the block and around the corner … it’s just a mess.”

While it makes sense for teams to take advantage of the NBA’s incentive structure so long as they can get away with it, the popularization of tanking has created a lose-lose situation for the league, the fans who pay large sums to attend games or watch on TV, the players who are missing out on crucial developmental reps and, most importantly, the NBA’s TV partners, who recently signed an 11-year agreement worth $ 76bn.

People have been trying to come up with creative solutions to solve the NBA’s tanking problem for more than a decade, ranging from flattening the draft lottery odds so that every non-playoff team has an equal chance of getting the No 1 overall pick, to creating a “play-out” tournament where the worst teams compete for better draft odds at the end of the season, to replacing the draft with rookie free agency.

But each so-called solution comes with unintended consequences, such as teams on the playoff bubble tanking to get in the lottery if the odds are flat or if there is a play-out tournament, and the best rookies hurting parity by signing in big markets in free agency.

We know that the NBA doesn’t approve of tanking because it has a long history of railing against it. The league pressured the 76ers to get rid of Hinkie in 2016, and fined Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban $ 600,000 for admitting to tanking in 2018.

The question, then, is how does the NBA keep a similar incentive structure but discourage the blatant, unethical tanking that has become popular in recent years? The obvious answer is to start by seriously penalizing anything that goes against the integrity of the game.

After all, we usually have a pretty good idea about who the worst teams are by the 50-game mark, with the league sorting itself into tiers of contenders, playoff teams and bottom-dwellers. But at a certain point, some teams rest veterans or quiet-quit to increase their lottery odds. The rest of the bottom-dwellers have no choice but to follow suit, and bam! Unmitigated, unethical tanking ensues.

“When I first came in the league, I don’t remember this happening as much,” Temple, who has been around the NBA since 2009, says. “People are trying to take advantage of situations and have their team be the best team they can be. At the end of the day, no team is doing this in order to have a bad team. They’re trying to make their team better.”

But what if there was a way to pressure teams to play out the entire season the way they play the first 50 games? That way, the lottery order would sort itself out naturally, and the worst teams would get the best odds without the need to ever lose on purpose.

It may sound extreme, but that’s exactly what happens in the NHL, where a culture of competitiveness and power at the hands of head coaches keeps teams from resting players in order to lose on purpose. Instead, the NHL employs a different, more ethical form of tanking where the worst teams choose to offload veteran players at the trade deadline and naturally lose out as a result.

The NBA can’t expect the culture to change naturally given that teams have learned how to exploit the system, but the league can make it a significantly harder system to game. This would require the NBA to get serious about discouraging tanking, penalizing teams who are found guilty of resting healthy players with significant fines or the removal of future draft picks in order to get the best players to play all season.

In March, the NBA fined the Utah Jazz $ 100,000 for violating the league’s player participation policy for sitting star Lauri Markkanen for nine straight games when he appeared to be free of significant injury. But the standard $ 100,000 fine that the league levied against the Jazz this year, the 76ers last year, and Mavericks the year before is a drop in the bucket for team owners like Ryan Smith, who has an estimated net worth of $ 2.6bn. And when Markkanen did return the following game, he played just 19 minutes and sat the entire second half, showing how seriously the organization took the penalty.

“These next few weeks,” one NBA executive told ESPN. “Could be the worst tanking stretch we’ve ever seen.”

What the NBA needs is a new set of rules specifically designed to discourage tanking – a “Shame Doctrine” that clearly lays out a set of increasingly significant penalties that will be levied against teams for tanking, with each infraction setting them back millions of dollars and future draft picks.

Of course, it can be complicated to police injuries when almost every player is banged up by the end of the season. But the league already has its own doctors to determine whether a player is healthy enough to play, and enforcing it would be similar to what the NFL does in order to satisfy football’s integrity (and the NFL’s betting partners).

Plus, common sense should apply here. If a team pulls its starters in the fourth quarter as the Raptors did, they should be penalized. If the Jazz refuse to spread out Markkanen’s minutes so that he only plays in the first half, so should they.

The solution isn’t to come up with a different incentive structure besides the lottery because they all have flaws. Instead, it’s time for the NBA to be proactive and get serious about penalizing tanking violations. Otherwise, teams will continue to find creative ways to game the system, and the product will continue to suffer.

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