The Brooklyn Nets will not be tanking tonight in OKC. After resting one or both of Michael Porter Jr. and Egor Demin on back-to-backs for two months, both players will play vs. the Oklahoma City Thunder in OKC, start time 9:00 p.m. ET.
The organization certainly would be within its rights to sit them without facing outrage over violating the game’s core ethos: winning. It was the second time a little more than a week that the Nets could point to as an example of them being ethical. The night the Washington Wizards caught the basketball world’s ire by sitting nine players, Brooklyn presented the league with a clean bill of health.
Are the Nets getting nervous that they’re too often being lumped alongside the NBA’s most notorious tankers? Are they trying to be the good boy compared to the Wizards, the Utah Jazz and the Indiana Pacers, the latter two both being fined six figures earlier this month? Afraid of deeper sanctions? Or is it simply that MPJ and Demin are good to go or that Sean Marks, Jordi Fernandez, et al want to see how Demin does against the defending champs.
On the other side, of course, Joe Tsai is the only NBA owner to sorta admit his team is trying to get as high a pick in the 2026 Draft Lottery
“Well, I have to say that we’re in a rebuilding year,” Joe Tsai said at the start of the season . “We spent all of our (2025) picks — we had five first-round draft picks this past summer.
“We have one pick in 2026, and we hope to get a good pick. So you can predict what kind of strategy we will use for this season.”
On Thursday, things got more interesting when ESPN reported that Adam Silver was considering further rule changes, beyond those democratizing the lottery between winners and losers back in 2019. Shams Charania wrote this Friday afternoon, discussing Silver talks with owners in December and GMs Thursday:
Sources with knowledge of Thursday’s meeting as well as a late January competition committee meeting told ESPN that these concepts have been discussed to curb tanking:
- First-round draft picks can be protected only for top-four or top-14-plus selections
- Lottery odds freeze at the trade deadline or a later date
- No longer allowing a team to pick in the top four in consecutive years and/or after consecutive bottom-three finishes
- Teams can’t pick in the top four the year after making the conference finals
- Lottery odds allocated based on two-year records
- Lottery extended to include all play-in teams
- Flatten odds for all lottery teams.
During Thursday’s GM meeting, Silver, the NBA office and the league’s 30 top team executives shared a desire to have ongoing discussions to safeguard the integrity of the sport.
None of these changes would effect what looks like a generational draft in June of this year. Any changes wouldn’t take place till 2027 or later. That said, the team with the most at stake in all this would be the team with the most draft picks: your Brooklyn Nets who have 13 first rounders (10 tradeable) and 20 seconds. They even have six picks in the 2032 Draft, two firsts and four seconds. If the Nets rebuild is going to succeed to the point that Tsai, Marks, Fernandez etc., hope, those picks will have to retain full value. So you’d think Brooklyn would oppose some of the more stringent measures being discussed.
Of course, the reason is that the 2026 Draft is seen as one of the best ever, challenging the 1996 and 2003 draft in both star power and depth. Somewhere between three and seven are seen as “franchise changing.” As Silver noted in his State of the League talks over All-Star Weekend, that’s led to an imbalance in fandom.
“I think there was a more classical view of that in the old days, where it was just sort of an understanding among partners in terms of behavior,” Silver said. “I think what we’re seeing is modern analytics, where it’s so clear that the incentives are misaligned. …The worst place to be, for example, is to be a middle-of-the-road team. Either be great or be bad, because then that will help you with the draft.
“In many cases, you have fans of those teams — remember, it’s not what they want to pay for to see poor performance on the floor, but they’re actually rooting for their teams in some cases to be bad to improve their draft chances.”
Been there, as Nets fans have long been divided on social media between tanking and anti-tanking contingents.
There are some, like Ricky O’Donnell of SB Nation, who’ve opined that the depth of the tanking is unlikely to become an entrenched phenomenon. The 2027 Draft, he (and others) note, is seen as mediocre. No need to distort the game if the reward is simply not worth the effort.
[T]he 2027 NBA Draft doesn’t look like it’s worth tanking for. While we knew prospects like Victor Wembanyama, Cooper Flagg, and Cameron Boozer were studs by the time they were sophomores in high school, there’s no one that looks the part of a future NBA superstar yet in the current senior class. I’d say the top prospects in 2027 right now are Tyran Stokes, Caleb Holt, and Anthony Thompson, but none of them are even close to a sure thing. The 2028 NBA Draft also doesn’t have an obvious top prospect at this point.
Things, he believes, will resolve itself.
Also, and this isn’t talked about. With the board of governors about to approve expansion, presumably to Seattle and Las Vegas, the league will have to schedule an expansion draft. Does the NBA basketball operations personnel want to plan for both a newly configured NBA draft and an expansion draft?
Meanwhile, at HSS Training Center, the scouting staff is inputting reports from the field whether the NCAA, or the NBL in Australia or the Chinese Basketball Association. This year’s picks – an almost certain high lottery pick and picks at the top and middle of the second round – will be unaffected.
Is all the tanking worth it. Just Thursday, Brian Windhorst of ESPN said in talking to NBA executives that the overall No. 1 pick in the draft could be worth $100 million … if the NBA rules didn’t limit cash considerations.
And Brian Lewis did some math and just how different the top of this year’s class is from previous ones.
Box plus-minus (which estimates a player’s total contribution to team performance) is considered a great indicator of future NBA success, with the elite starting between 8.0 and 10.0 (per Basketball Reference) and the truly transcendent reaching over 13.0. Since 2010-11, only 11 freshmen — so, less than one per year — have recorded a 12.0 or better, with all but two becoming top-3 picks.
This season alone, a staggering half-dozen freshmen stars are currently above 12.0: Boozer (19.4), uber-athletic North Carolina forward Caleb Wilson (13.9), Peterson (13.5), two-way Houston point guard Kingston Flemings (12.9), sharpshooting Illinois guard Keaton Wagler (12.8) and Dybantsa (12.3).
For perspective, Boozer’s historic freshman campaign trails only Zion Williamson and is ahead of the aforementioned Davis and Cooper Flagg, all top overall picks. Meanwhile, even the last of that sextet grades out ahead of Brandon Miller, the No. 2 pick in 2023 and currently thr No. 32-rated player on The Ringer’s latest NBA Trade Value Rankings.
No Net cracked the top 81 in that list, not even leading scorer Michael Porter Jr.
So better to focus on the 2025 rookies or the 2026 draft.
