Tanking is the strategy of fielding a deliberately weakened team to lose games and improve draft lottery position, a practice the league penalizes and repeatedly reforms against.
Tanking is the league's open secret: losing on purpose, slowly, for draft position. No team announces it and every fan recognizes it, the veteran stars resting, the lineups of rookies and fringe players, the season written off by January in the name of a better lottery chance at a franchise player in June.
The league's countermeasures are the term's history. The draft lottery itself was created in 1985 to blunt the reward for finishing last, odds were flattened in 2019 so the worst teams gain less, and the league can fine teams for resting healthy stars, especially in nationally televised games, under its player participation policy. Each reform admits the same arithmetic: one superstar draft pick can be worth more than a season of wins, so teams will keep doing the math.
Tanking divides fans morally, which is why this glossary defines it neutrally and factually, as a documented strategy with documented countermeasures, argued about from the moment rebuilding and quitting became hard to tell apart. Quiz questions about lottery odds, infamous losing seasons, and the reforms they triggered are tanking questions, and the definition's balance, strategy, incentive, response, is the whole answer.
In use"Accused of tanking, the rebuilding team rested its veterans and played its rookies forty minutes a night."