The story of this NBA season has, in effect, nothing to do with it.
Hanging over the entire league is one of the greatest races to the bottom we’ve seen in sports; a desperate attempt to land the kid who’s arguably the greatest prospect in NBA history.
Victor Wembanyama, the 224cm, 18-year-old French “alien” who has the shot-blocking ability of compatriot Rudy Gobert combined with the ball-handling skills, shooting and athleticism of a guard is effectively going to break the NBA lottery system.
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After all, this is the sport and league that made tanking famous. The Sixers’ then-edict of ‘trust the process’ dates back almost a decade, before they got Joel Embiid and well before Ben Simmons.
They were the extreme example of the idea that if you’re gonna be bad, you may as well be really bad, because being stuck in the middle means you’re going nowhere. While this doesn’t apply to every sport perfectly, it certainly hits hard in the NBA, where one player can turn around your fortunes because of the smaller team size.
A freakish display of his talents last week when his French side travelled to Las Vegas to battle the G League Elite, featuring No.2 prospect – and No.1 in almost any other draft – Scott Henderson saw Wembanyama rocket into the general NBA discourse, escaping the bubble of draft nerddom that knew he was on the horizon.
“Put simply, we have never seen anything like this before,” former Memphis VP of basketball operations and The Athletic analyst John Hollinger wrote.
“Wembanyama is a basketball evolution all his own, a unicorn even among unicorns, the unholy melding of the best traits of Ralph Sampson, Kristaps Porziņģis and Dirk Nowitzki.
“Between the size and length and the off-the-charts skill level, calling Wembanyama a generational prospect feels somewhat like calling fire an important discovery; while true, it still comes across as a massive understatement.”
There have been years where much of the NBA world’s attention was placed on the upcoming draft and its attached lottery. The 2003 class featuring LeBron James was one; the 2007 battle for No.1 between Greg Oden and Kevin Durant, helped by the fact they played college basketball and were thus televised was another.
But, almost helped by the fact that few people will be watching Wembanyama’s games – the French league doesn’t exactly get primetime broadcasts beamed into American homes – this season will take it to an extreme.
“We haven’t seen this really since the Samson-(Hakeem) Olajuwon-(Patrick) Ewing era in the 80s, because we haven’t had a prospect like this since, with teams just going, I’ll do anything to get this guy,” The Ringer’s Bill Simmons said on The Lowe Post podcast.
“I don’t even think LeBron was like this. Teams will actually compromise their integrity to get this guy this season, if they can.”
ESPN’s Zach Lowe responded: “Immediately during that first game (in Las Vegas), my phone, your phone starts blowing up with front office people, people at the game, scouts, going holy s–t.
“This is gonna be the biggest story in the NBA this season – a guy who’s not even in the NBA.
“You had this school of thought, of GMs saying the race to the bottom is going to be incredible. And I do think there was some leveraging going on in the media – a disproportionate amount of the race to the bottom stuff came from big-market teams who would really like Utah and Indiana and on and on, to trade their players for nothing and lower their prices.
“And then I would hear the opposite from people inside teams like that who would say oh no, we’re going to be bad enough.”
The Wenbanyama sweepstakes will be so competitive, and so worth winning, that more teams will attempt to tank than ever before. And as Lowe points out, that could help the teams that actually want to win.
But isn’t this supposed to have stopped? After all, the NBA flattened out the lottery odds after 2018.
Now the three worst teams get the same odds at winning Pick 1 – 14 per cent – down from before when the absolute worst record earned you a 25 per cent shot at No.1, and a 21.5 per cent chance of the runners-up prize.
If you’re the worst team in the league, your odds of getting Pick 1 or 2 have almost been cut in half, down from 46.5 per cent to 27.4 per cent, odds you share with the second and third-worst teams.
NBA Lottery Odds (to get Pick 1, ie Wembanyama)
1st to 3rd worst records: 14%
4th: 12.5%
5th: 10.5%
6th: 9%
7th: 7.5%
8th: 6%
9th: 4.5%
10th: 3%
11th: 2%
12th: 1.5%
13th: 1%
14th: 0.5%
NBA Lottery Odds (to get Pick 1 OR 2, ie Wembanyama or Henderson)
1st to 3rd worst records: 27.4%
4th: 24.7%
5th: 21%
6th: 18.2%
7th: 15.3%
8th: 12.3%
9th: 9.3%
10th: 6.3%
11th: 4.4%
12th: 3.2%
13th: 2.1%
14th: 1.1%
So while these flattened odds may reduce the likelihood of teams trying to be the absolute, no-doubt worst – going 10-72 or even more horrific – they create another problem.
There is now enough incentive for the bad-but-not-terrible teams to tank too, especially when the prize is as good as Wembanyama.
Even being the sixth-worst team in the NBA this year will give you an almost one-in-five shot of Pick 1 or 2, and access to either Wembanyama or Henderson. Heck, the ninth-worst team gets almost a one-in-10 shot.
Giddey UP! Josh throws down huge poster | 00:35
Those odds are more appealing, because Wembanyama is so good, than contending for the fringes of the play-in.
“Here’s what’s definitely going to happen. The worst teams are taking no chances. They’re already pretty confident they’re gonna be really bad, but if there’s a hint of ‘uh oh, we might be the sixth worst team’, those teams are going to take steps to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Lowe said on his podcast.
“Some team that is allegedly in the middle, but I think is closer to not being in the middle, is going to start 2-10 and then their owner … is going to say OK cool, we’re pulling the plug, let’s go for broke.
“And then what’s underplayed about the lottery odds is how much they’ve helped teams 5 to 9 in the worst record derby.
“100 per cent I would bet money on, with 30 to 40 games left in the season … some team within three games of the play-in, and three games of like sixth in the lottery, is going to say we’re done.
“We’re done because what’s going to happen if we keep trying is we miss the playoffs and have a two per cent chance at a top-two pick. If we stop trying now and go 3-27 the rest of the way … we can go from two per cent to 18 per cent, 20 per cent at one of those two guys.
“100 per cent some team within striking distance of the play-in is going to do that.”
So who are the contenders to add this generational prospect?
San Antonio and Utah clearly saw the opportunity coming, trading away their best players across the off-season and cementing themselves as among the dirt-worst, alongside Houston.
Teams like Oklahoma City, Indiana, Orlando and Detroit have the slight problems of being a bit too good – though OKC losing rookie Chet Holmgren for the season helps them in that regard. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Tyrese Haliburton, Paolo Banchero and Cade Cunningham may need to be aggressively rested for their respective sides.
The middling sides Lowe was referring to, who may quickly go from the fringes of the play-in to the pits of despair, would include Charlotte and Washington.
Already you can see the extent of the tanking problem we’re about to see. That’s nine teams – almost a third of the league – that can make the realistic case right now that every win in the 2022-23 season is hurting their chances of winning an NBA championship (with Wembanyama).
And that doesn’t even include teams like Sacramento, who so desperately want to be good so they can hang a banner for losing an away play-in game, but own the longest postseason drought in major US sports (16 years), or Portland, who could decide to turn the lights off if something happens to Damian Lillard.
Giddey UP! Josh throws down huge poster | 00:35
The very nature of the NBA only adds to the likelihood of tanking – in terms of team ownership.
The skyrocketing values of NBA teams means owners can, if they want to, get out of the game and make billions on what they paid. Forbes estimates the Knicks, Warriors and Lakers are all worth over $US5.5 billion, while 14 teams are worth at least $US2 billion, and all of them at least $US1.5 billion.
And those figures are almost certainly unders. The Suns, valued at $US1.8 billion by Forbes, look likely to sell for at least double that amid the Robert Sarver scandal.
A large part of these valuations is where the team is based – there’s a reason big cities on the coasts New York, Golden State (San Francisco) and Los Angeles are at the top, while small-market, middle-of-the-country Memphis, New Orleans and Minnesota are at the bottom – but the quality of the team sure doesn’t hurt.
And according to Bill Simmons, adding Wembanyama to one of those bottom sides would be a billion-dollar boost to the owners’ pockets.
“LeBron on Cleveland we know was worth a $500 million swing, because they’d have those Forbes things and Cleveland was a top-three team when they had him, as soon as they didn’t have him they were worth like $500 million,” he said on The Lowe Post.
“To me, this guy’s worth a billion-plus. Think about what Giannis is worth to Milwaukee … we’ll see if they sell and we’ll see what the evaluation is, Giannis is part of that evaluation. Same with the Suns right now – if the Suns stunk, they’re not getting $4.4 billion, but they have Devin Booker, they have Ayton, they have Chris Paul.
“If you had Wembanyama on Charlotte, which I would say is one of the lowest (value) what a team would go for teams, probably on the $1.5 to $2 (billion) range on the really low end. You put him there that’s now a $3.5 billion team.”
American sports team owners all want to win championships and make money – some seem to care more about the latter than the former.
Wembanyama is the golden ticket to do both. And all you have to do is stink for a year.
