Portland Trail Blazers fans not only completed the Tanking 101 course over the past few seasons, but received a post-graduate degree by the time the team started winning games early in 2025. Which makes recent tanking efforts of other teams all the more clear. Just a week ago, the Toronto Raptors seemed to avoid NBA tanking fines by starting (most of) their best players against the Blazers, but [sitting them in the fourth quarter](https://www.blazersedge.com/2025/3/16/24387113/raptors-tanking-scottie-barnes-jacob-poeltl-blazers) to grab a loss from the clutches of victory.
ESPN’s Kevin Pelton and Tim Bontemps [took a deeper dive in this concept today](https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/44378503/can-nba-fix-tanking-why-worse-season-plus-5-solutions). As teams race to get a possible game-changing star in Duke’s Cooper Flagg, or a series of really nice consolation prizes, fans watch renewed efforts of jockeying for draft position. They revisit a recent game between the Raptors and the Utah Jazz, where a similar “tanking template” was used in the fourth quarter.
> Instead of a matchup between All-Star forwards Markkanen and Scottie Barnes, fans watched a fourth quarter filled with rookies and reserves from both teams. Markkanen did not return for the second half, while Barnes and Toronto’s other veteran starters (RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley) played only the first two minutes of the final period before leaving for good.
The duo look at options for how the NBA might “fix” (or at least mitigate the advantages of) tanking around the league. Unfortunately, it’s a tough situation. Some teams simply have few options than to be bad for a while with hopes to be good again. However, other teams, most famously the 2023 Dallas Mavericks and this season’s Philadelphia 76ers, might pivot late in the season in an attempt to keep their protected pick.
Among their possible options: Counting wins instead of losses late in the season, flattening the lottery odds, or no longer allowing so many pick protections. However, their last option gets to the heart of the matter: “Enforce the current rules.” The league could accept tanking as a necessity, and simply take a stronger view on enforcing anti-competitive practices like sitting players in a clear attempt to influence a result. They note that the NBA may revisit this over the summer.
> But Wasch also indicated that tanking, and ways to address it, could come up with the NBA’s competition committee.
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> “Coming off this season, it would be reasonable to expect that we would reengage with our competition committee,” Wasch said. “And see if there’s anything they might want to explore to tackle the issue.”
After three years of top-seven picks, the Trail Blazers have chosen not to tank late in the season, instead bringing players back during illnesses to try to win their way out of the bottom third of the Western Conference. Three of their remaining ten games feature opponents having various degrees of tanking “success”: The aforementioned Jazz and Raptors, and the still-tied-with-the-Blazers San Antonio Spurs.