A Brief Diversion to Sports: Or You Wanted Tanking, So Stop Whining

Not my normal fare, I will admit, but I am looking forward to my cranky old man phase and figured I would get a head-start. And, hey, Trump didn’t commit any obvious war crimes yesterday, and seems to have admitted that he lost the war in Iran, so maybe we can use a bit of a break.

Anyway.

Yes, the headline does refer to you, if you are anyone who ever argued in favor of a salary cap or salary-cap-like mechanism, including a draft, in professional sports. This is the world you wanted, and you should stop whining about it. For the uninitiated, tanking is when an organization deliberately tries to put the worst team possible in play in order to drop in the standings and have a better chance of landing a potential superstar player in the upcoming draft. It is widely considered one of the best, most direct routes to sustained success. And that is by design.

I bring this up today because there has been a ton of discussion around tanking, especially in the NBA, and I find all of it annoying. Tanking is the end result of fans thinking like owners and this weird notion that a championship and only a championship matters in sports. Fans accepted the owners’ pleas that they needed “cost control” in order to allow teams in small markets to compete. This is nonsense, of course. Small teams in the NFL compete just fine, largely because they all share the television rights and therefore they all compete on a level financial playing field. Yes, the NFL has a salary cap, but that is merely a means by which owners capture undeserved rewards from the players. But no other league shares its primary revenue, so other leagues had to come up with other methods. All of those methods encourage tanking.

If you have a salary cap in a league that does not share all revenues, then the most valuable players are good players on cheap contracts. Every salary cap has a rookie wage scale, meaning that new players, no matter how talented, are paid less than their worth even within the confines of a capped league. That makes them extremely valuable, as you get an outsized amount of talent for a cheap cost, allowing you to spend more on more marginal players to complement them. It is the kind of efficiency that only an idiot passes up. But it doesn’t stop there.

Every league has some system to encourage players that are drafted to remain with their teams. Free agency is restricted, meaning young players cannot decide to just leave the team that drafted them. Many leagues either have a method of forcing a player to stay against their will, like the NFL, or make it so that the team that drafted them can pay them more than other teams, like the NBA and NHL. This is allegedly in service of keeping smaller market teams viable.

Without constraints on player movement and encouragement to stay, the thinking goes, the players will want to leave for richer markets. This, of course, goes back to the fact that teams are not on a level financial playing field. But most good players value winning. You need to be almost psychopathically dedicated to winning in order to break into a professional league, much less succeed in it. Players drift towards teams that are well run. Mitch Marner, one of the best players in the NHL, left the huge market in Toronto for the comparatively smaller market in Las Vegas because the Toronto franchise is apparently run by three bad ideas in a trench coat and the Vegas franchise is mostly definitely not.

Ahh, I can hear people saying, what about MLB? The Mets and Dodgers outspend everyone, and that league doesn’t have a cap. First, please note that the Mets and Yankees have won neither jack nor shit in the last two decades. Money is not a cure-all. And to the extent that it helps competitive balance (something not evident in the MLB, at least), it only does so because the leagues do not share all revenue. For the revenue they do share, they do not mandate that such sharing be put entirely back into teams. It can be, often is, a source of pure profit. Effectively, already rich owners want to make themselves richer at the expense of the players. And note that teams still tank. My White Sox have tanked for years with the hopes of getting good players in the draft that they can keep under their control for less than market rates. Unfortunately for White Sox fans, they don’t seem to ever get really good players — front office skill still matters.

The other side of this is whether tanking is really that bad. Yeah, sometimes you won’t see your favorite players in a given game, but players do not tank. The Blackhawks tanked hard a few years ago in the hopes of drafting Connor Bedard, a player widely considered to be a star in waiting. They traded away every player not nailed down, and they still didn’t finish with the best odds to draft Bedard that year. Their players simply refused to lie down and give up. Now, the Hawks got lucky and did draft Bedard, along with a host of other exciting young players, many of whom are making their way into the NHL today. For a couple of years of tanking, I now get to see exciting young players play an exciting brand of high-skill hockey, with the promise of more such players maturing into the league in the next two years. Hardly the worst outcome.

Regardless, the fault, if fault exists, lies in the owners and the fans who think like owners. As long as all revenue is not shared equally, as long as there are salary caps, as long as players are drafted, then tanking is going to exist. The system is designed to create tanking. If you want to remove tanking, then you need to force teams to share all revenue, stop artificially restricting the players’ earnings while they are young, and force teams to compete on a level playing field. Otherwise, the value of having under-market value players will always drive some degree of tanking. And if you are worried that small market teams cannot survive without those restrictions, then take the teams from the owners and run them as community resources. The owners, in sports leagues, don’t provide anything in the way of value. Public or employee ownership is, once again, the solution to all the world’s problems.

To sum up: tanking is impossible to prevent given the fact that owners want to limit player salaries and fans think such limits are the only way to keep small market teams afloat. If that’s your choice, then so be it. But it is your choice to accept tanking, then. This is the world you chose. If you don’t want tanking, then you are going to have to accept either less competition within those strictures or insist on much more radical changes to the structure of the sport.

Now that I have irritated about eighty percent of sports fans — you, yeah you. You are standing on my grass. Get off.