{"text":[[{"start":6.7,"text":"An hour before the Washington Wizards’ final home game of the season, fans were already lining up outside Capital One Arena in the heart of downtown DC. This was not, on paper, an event that demanded punctuality. The Wizards were the worst team in the NBA, their season had been written off almost as soon as it began, and by April the only standings that mattered were upside down."}],[{"start":30.55,"text":"The inducement was a black Wizards T-shirt, free to the first 15,000 fans. This figure seemed, given the state of the team, optimistic. The Wizards’ home games had the second-lowest attendance in the league and the ill-fitting promotional shirts seemed poor consolation for the fans still willing to show up. But by the time I made it inside, the boxes were being emptied at a brisk pace. "}],[{"start":53.1,"text":"The Wizards were playing the Miami Heat. Or rather, some version of the Wizards. Several of the names that might have persuaded a casual fan to buy a ticket were resting, or nursing prolonged injuries."}],[{"start":65.2,"text":"American sports leagues want parity. They want bad teams to have hope. So the NBA gives its worst teams the best odds of securing the best young players in the summer’s draft — redistribution for failing franchises, in a league of billionaire owners."}],[{"start":80.85000000000001,"text":"Everyone in the building seemed to understand the incentive: for a team at the bottom of the standings, another loss could be more useful than a win. What exactly was the paying public supposed to do with that knowledge? For now, they did what basketball crowds do. They queued, filed through metal detectors, took the free shirt, bought soft drinks in $13 commemorative cups and found their seats amid the cacophony of warm-up music. Possibly the best thing the Wizards could do for their future that night was disappoint everyone in the room."}],[{"start":112.15,"text":"Meandering amid the throngs grabbing pretzels and popcorn before the game, I met Michael Russo, a middle school social studies teacher from Long Island. He’d driven 250 miles to the nation’s capital to watch his niece perform in the Wizards’ dance squad. His son had tagged along, hoping to see Anthony Davis."}],[{"start":131.05,"text":"Davis was, in theory, the kind of player for whom a child might tolerate a losing team: a 10-time All-Star, a league champion, a man who “can do everything on the floor”, as LeBron James once said. Davis’s arrival in Washington gave the Wizards something they had mostly lacked all season: a recognisable reason for casual fans to look up from their phones. But Davis was not playing. He had not, in fact, made his Wizards debut since joining the team two months earlier. He was somewhere in the liminal category that defines late-season basketball for bad teams: present but unavailable, central to the marketing but peripheral to the evening. Benched by ligament damage in his left hand, Davis would spend the game burrowed into a brown hoodie on the sidelines."}],[{"start":178.4,"text":"Russo did not seem angry so much as resigned. He understood the logic. At the tail-end of a season in which the Wizards had tied their record losing streak — 16 games — there was little reason to risk anyone important. Winning a game would not rescue the year. It might damage the next one."}],[{"start":195.45000000000002,"text":"“The prices they charge, I mean . . . there are all the bells and whistles, but it doesn’t feel fair to the public to then say, ‘We’re not even trying,’” Russo said. “Still, it’s a spectacle. You’re seeing players do things that no one else can.”"}],[{"start":210.3,"text":"The logic of tanking is simple enough. On May 10, the draft order will be decided by pulling ping-pong balls out of a bucket. The worse a team does, the better the odds that it wins a coveted early pick."}],[{"start":222.9,"text":"This year’s prized group of young prospects — potentially generational talent — and a byzantine web of trade agreements have created an exceptionally anti-competitive field of middling teams racing towards the bottom of the standings."}],[{"start":236.05,"text":"“[Tanking has] been part of this league for a long time,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in February, adding that the behaviour was the worst he’d seen in recent memory. “What we’re doing, what we’re seeing right now is not working.”"}],[{"start":249.10000000000002,"text":"The NBA has fined the Utah Jazz $500,000 and the Indiana Pacers $100,000 for benching healthy players and the league now appears to be trying to change the lottery’s structure. Among the ideas reportedly circulating are larger lotteries and flatter odds (which would dilute the tanking incentive) and penalties for the very worst teams. "}],[{"start":271.15000000000003,"text":"But any system that rewards losing suffers from the same incentive problem. Penalise the bottom three and the goal becomes finishing fourth worst. Every fix creates another target."}],[{"start":282.55,"text":"With half an hour to kill before tipoff in DC, I bought a refillable commemorative cup of Coke and followed the crowd to the Wizards’ merch store. The team had been losing for months, but there was a queue out of the door. Almost everything was 40 per cent off. The picked-over shelves offered little to take home. The replica jerseys left were limited to extra-extra-small and extra-extra-large. Colour options had dwindled to pink and mustard brown."}],[{"start":311,"text":"A group of young men, all burly enough to fill out their newly purchased XXL jerseys, asked why I was wandering around with a notebook. When I replied that I was on assignment to investigate tanking, one of them, Ryan Samuels, told me, “Write this down: We know the Wizards are going to lose and we don’t care. There’s a blueprint in the NBA: you have to lose so you can get draft picks,” he continued. “You lose until you get better.”"}],[{"start":337.75,"text":"So a discounted jersey was not just a souvenir from a bad season, but an investment in a redemption story yet to come?"}],[{"start":345.55,"text":"“You have to believe the future is bright. Otherwise, what’s the point?” Samuels said. “You have to trust the process.” "}],[{"start":352.7,"text":"That phrase — “trust the process” — is synonymous with, and the de facto justification for, tanking. The term started as a mantra during the Philadelphia 76ers’ radical rebuild during the 2013 season. General manager Sam Hinkie deliberately stripped the team, trading veterans for draft picks. The 76ers got better, even good, but a championship never materialised."}],[{"start":378.8,"text":"“It’s a scam,” David Berri, a sports economist at Southern Utah University, told me. “It’s easy to lose. And you justify it by pinning your whole hope on some 19-year-old kid.”"}],[{"start":389.90000000000003,"text":"Berri’s objection is not that great players don’t matter, but that teams wildly overestimate their ability to identify them. Still, the strategy has an intractable hold on general managers trying to provide some semblance of a strategy."}],[{"start":null,"text":"
"}],[{"start":403.55,"text":"Before the end of the first quarter, I’d lost my soft-drink cup and headed to the bar. Tucked into one corner of the arena was Caesars Sportsbook and Restaurant, the first legal sports-betting venue inside a US professional sports arena. The space resembled a Las Vegas lounge. Plush couches and armchairs were arranged around wall-size TV screens. "}],[{"start":425.45,"text":"I gravitated to a row of machines that looked like ATMs where customers could place bets. A 27-year-old Virginia native named Tyler walked me through his parlay that would pay out if a constellation of events materialised that evening. Between the noise, my unfamiliarity with sports gambling and Tyler’s inebriation, here’s what I could gather: he needed the total score to be above 250 points, the Heat to win by at least 19, and Bam Adebayo to get at least 20 points and 10 rebounds. The list went on, my notes did not."}],[{"start":462.34999999999997,"text":"I began to ask Tyler about the league’s tanking epidemic, but he cut me off: “I don’t really care. It’s nice to win, but that’s not really important.”"}],[{"start":470.84999999999997,"text":"The rise of gambling has fundamentally changed how fans interact with basketball, and raised ethical concerns that overlap with those posed by tanking teams, Smith College economist and sports historian Andrew Zimbalist told me. In football, a player is one of 11 on his team on the field. In baseball, a star comes to bat only every few innings. But in basketball, five players are on the court for each side, and a single great one can change a franchise. “There’s a much larger potential impact on the game,” Zimbalist said."}],[{"start":503.7,"text":"That potential impact is what makes tanking especially attractive in the NBA, and makes the league susceptible to manipulation. In October, federal prosecutors brought charges against Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and former NBA player Damon Jones, alleging they used inside information about player injuries to place illegal bets. Rozier has pleaded not guilty. In April, Jones pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. "}],[{"start":533.8,"text":"“Fans want there to be uncertainty,” Zimbalist said. If they start to believe the competition is fixed, or pointless, “fans will become less interested”."}],[{"start":543.3499999999999,"text":"Over the next two hours, the Wizards didn’t look hopeless. While stars like Davis sat out the game, young players like Bub Carrington and Bilal Coulibaly kept things watchable. A few rows away from the court, I sat next to retired high-school basketball coach Grady Bryant. He had been a Wizards season-ticket holder for 15 years, and paid about $8,000 a year for his seats. Lately he had begun to wonder why. He was not offended by losing, exactly. What bothered him was the way the Wizards lost: the shortcuts, the loose possessions, the small abandonments of order. After one shot bounced clumsily off the rim, he shook his head. “That shot was ill-advised,” he said to me. “They’re not doing the simple stuff you learn in high school.”"}],[{"start":588.05,"text":"Berri had described the same problem in economic terms. Even when a team has little reason to win, its players still have every reason to make an impression. “When there is no winning, I need to shoot and get paid,” Berri explained."}],[{"start":601.15,"text":"The game unfolded as those incentives would suggest: Carrington scored 30 points, Coulibaly got 25. The Wizards would finish the night shooting 50 per cent from the field and 45 per cent from three. But missing a coherent defence, they lost 140-117 — promising for Tyler’s bet — and clinched the worst record in the league."}],[{"start":622.1999999999999,"text":"As the game wound down, cheerleaders threw T-shirts and foil-wrapped hot dogs into the stands. Most of the crowd around us jumped to their feet for the first time that night. I suggested to Bryant that this might be the low point of the evening. He shook his head. The low point was still on the sideline, he said — the players who might have made the Wizards competitive, sitting in street clothes."}],[{"start":644.1999999999999,"text":"He lingered after the final buzzer, in the seats where he’d watched the game for the past 15 years and might soon give up. Everyone else in the room had found something else to cheer for, but Bryant stayed quiet. He’d seen enough bad basketball."}],[{"start":660.5999999999999,"text":"Ian Hodgson is an FT data journalist in Washington"}],[{"start":664.9499999999999,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram"}],[{"start":679.5999999999999,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1778986387_8135.mp3"}