Let’s talk about tanking.
It’s actually not as easy as it might seem to pull off a really successful tank job. First of all, no one is going to convince players to throw games, and NBA coaches aren’t coaching players to do the wrong thing so that a game is lost. So, you have to give a coach a roster of players so bad that they won’t be able to coach them to victories.
Additionally, along the way you have to think about the future, and you don’t want players who will be a part of the future of your franchise getting so downtrodden by losses that they no longer believe in themselves.
So, if you really want to lose a lot of games you have to play a lot of players that won’t have any part in a team’s future and you have to put enough mediocre, inexperienced and young players together that they won’t be able to win, despite their efforts and desire.
For a lot of people, when they think about a tanking NBA team, the first thing that comes to mind are The Process-era Philadelphia 76ers from about 10 years ago — a team that was specifically constructed over the course of multiple years to lose games so that they could increase their chances at multiple top draft picks.
We’re talking about a team that lost 26 straight games at one point in the 2013-14 season. They finished that year with just 19 wins and during the 2014-15 season they won just 18 games.
Those rosters featured players like Jarvis Varnado, Elliot Williams, Hollis Thompson, Furkan Aldemir, Henry Sims, JaKarr Sampson and former BYU captain Brandon Davies.
Although Utah Jazz fans will be familiar with Davies because of his local ties, that is a list of players who played a ton of legitimate minutes for the Sixers but who probably couldn’t be identified by even the most dedicated NBA fans.
Try guessing which teams these players are on now. Go ahead and try.
Want a hint?
Well, none of them are in the NBA, so that eliminates at least 30 teams they could be on.
Related
The locker room after some of those Sixers losses deep into the 2014-15 season was a bleak place. The players knew exactly why they’d been put together. They knew that the front office didn’t believe in them. They knew that they were a scheduled win for nearly every team they faced and that they were just a stepping stone.
You could practically see the last slivers of confidence slip out…