The NBA has this completely upside down. With just days left in the regular season and the playoffs about to take over the calendar, the league should be focused on delivering its most valuable product. Its biggest teams and stars in its biggest games to its television partners. This is the stretch-run inventory. The games that are supposed to rate. The games that justify rights fees that now run into the billions.
Instead, the NBA remains fixated on tanking. It is still trying to engineer the bottom of the standings, layering on lottery reform ideas that grow more complex by the year. An 18-team lottery that pulls in play-in teams, and a 22-team version that includes early playoff exits. Plus uses two-year records and full draft-order drawings where the worst team could fall into the teens, and even the concept of artificial win floors.
It is an extraordinary amount of energy aimed at a problem that, when viewed through a ratings lens, barely registers.
Fans are not tuning out the NBA because the worst teams are losing. They never have. They tune out when the games they expect to matter don’t deliver the players they expect to see.
That’s not theory. That’s what the numbers show.
Start with the local markets, where fan behavior is most consistent and easiest to track over time. The teams most often cited in the tanking debate — the Washington Wizards, Brooklyn Nets, Utah Jazz, and Sacramento Kings — do not show the kind of year-over-year ratings collapse that would suggest tanking is driving fans away.
Washington has hovered near the bottom of local ratings for years. With minimal variance whether the team is flirting with 30 wins or sinking below 20.
Brooklyn provides a cleaner case study. Its local ratings dropped roughly 20 percent, but that decline aligned almost perfectly with the departures of Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving. That wasn’t about losing. It was about losing star power.
Sacramento is the counterexample that undercuts the entire tanking argument. After years of irrelevance, the Sacramento Kings saw their ratings jump by more than 50 percent the moment they became competitive again. The audience didn’t disappear. It re-engaged instantly.
Utah, even in a reset, remains one of the league’s strongest local television markets, often ranking in the top third of the NBA.
The conclusion is unavoidable: local ratings are resilient, driven far more by player visibility and team relevance than by whether a franchise is optimizing its draft position.
Now shift to the national picture, where the real money is made. Where NBC, Amazon, and ESPN will operate. This is where the NBA’s priorities should align, because this is where the volatility exists.
National NBA broadcasts typically fluctuate in the range of 5 to 10 percent year over year, with some windows swinging even wider depending on schedule quality. Games featuring marquee teams and healthy stars routinely outperform baseline expectations. They often draw 15 to 25 percent higher viewership than average regular-season matchups.
Conversely, when key players are missing — particularly in showcase games — viewership can drop by similar margins. That’s the sensitivity. That’s the exposure. This season has been a case study in how fragile that equation can be.
Stephen Curry has missed more than 40 games. Cade Cunningham has been out for over 20. Nikola Jokić is approaching 20 missed games. Victor Wembanyama is around 15. Luka Dončić and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander fall into that same range, already pushing up against or below the 65-game threshold.
Add in Giannis Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid, and LeBron James, all missing significant time. The league has spent much of the season with a rotating cast of its most important draws unavailable.
Some of that is unavoidable. This has been a legitimately injury-heavy year. However, from a television standpoint, the distinction between injury and load management is almost irrelevant. The outcome is the same: games that are supposed to carry weight end up diluted.
That is the NBA’s real ratings issue — not whether the worst team finishes with 18 wins or 22.
That is why the 65-game rule stands out as the one policy that addresses the problem. It is framed as an awards eligibility requirement, but in practice, it functions as a participation incentive. A way to push star players onto the floor by tying availability to recognition and, by extension, financial upside.
It is still new enough that its full effect on player behavior hasn’t been measured. But the logic is sound and the direction is right. At the very least, it targets the correct issue.
The same cannot be said for the anti-tanking machinery.
The reality is simple: fans do not care if the best players on the worst teams sit. Those teams are not driving national windows. They are not shaping prime-time schedules and are not the inventory that NBC and ESPN are building around.
What matters is whether the best players on the best teams are available when those games are played.
That’s what drives ratings, sustains value, and what the league should be protecting. Instead, it continues to devote outsized attention to anti-tanking proposals that are unlikely to materially impact viewership and risk creating a different kind of problem altogether.
The more complex the draft system becomes — with multi-year formulas, expanded lottery pools, and dramatic, unpredictable draft-order swings — the more it invites skepticism. If a top prospect ends up in a major market under one of these frameworks, the reaction will not be appreciation for competitive balance.
It will be suspicion about the process. The league will have spent years engineering a system so elaborate that no outcome looks accidental. In that environment, every lottery result becomes a conspiracy waiting to be written. The NBA has enough credibility problems without manufacturing new ones.
The NBA’s business is not driven by its worst teams. It is driven by its best ones — by stars, by matchups, and by the reliability of its top-tier product. Local numbers hold steady even in losing seasons. National numbers rise when stars are present and fall when they are not.
That is the signal. Everything else is noise.
The problem isn’t tanking. It never was. The problem is that too often, the games that are supposed to matter most don’t consistently feature the players who make them matter. Until the NBA fully commits to solving that — until it stops trying to fix the bottom of the standings instead of the stars and teams at the top — it will keep chasing the wrong solution.
Upside down.
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With decades of experience behind the mic, John Lund is more than a sports commentator and weekly columnist for Barrett Media—he’s a storyteller, humorist, and true fan. He’s hosted shows in mid sized markets like Pittsburgh and Salt Lake City to larger cities like San Francisco, Detroit and Dallas. John has even hosted nationally on ESPN Radio. Known for his sharp wit and deep sports knowledge, John welcomes your feedback. Reach him on X @JohnLundRadio or by email at John@JohnLundRadio.com.
