If Your Favorite Team Sucks, They Won’t Be Getting Better

The odds of flipping a fair coin and having it land on tails 28 times in a row are roughly four in a billion. Unfortunately for the Detroit Pistons, games involving them are not 50:50. The Pistons, proud owners of a 6-43 record, as of February 5, 2023, are on pace to become the third-worst team in NBA history. They have suffered a 28-game losing streak, the NBA’s single-season record, and have somehow managed to further disappoint fans who already suffered through a league-worst 17 wins last season. 

But if they’ve hit rock bottom, at least they have lots of company this season. The San Antonio Spurs experienced their own embarrassing streak, losing 18 games in a row. The Washington Wizards are off to the 16th worst start of all time, with just nine wins to their name. And despite their relatively strong 10-39 record, the Charlotte Hornets have the worst point differential in the NBA, even below the Pistons. 

In a league with supposedly more parity than it used to have, what is behind these historically awful seasons, and why are all these teams suffering in tandem? For that matter, why are there such terrible teams in so many professional sports leagues? In the NFL, the Carolina Panthers went 2-15, finishing with the fewest points per game in a decade and ending the year on the receiving end of consecutive shutouts. In the MLB, the Oakland Athletics suffered a season so humiliating that they’re moving to Las Vegas, winning less than a third of their games. In the English Premier League, Sheffield United is on pace to have the fifth-worst record and second-worst point differential ever, and relegation contenders Burnley aren’t far behind.

Trying to understand bad teams should absolutely go on a case-by-case basis, as the reasons for failure are manifold. Causes can range from bad coaching to poor chemistry to a simple inability to adapt to new styles. An example of that could be, say, an NBA team refusing to play for three-pointers even as they become more and more prevalent in today’s league.

But no matter the explanation, there is at least one silver lining for all of these bad teams: they have a brighter outlook for the future. Most American professional sports leagues award draft picks in the inverse order of the standings, meaning that the worst teams get the top picks to select the best young players, who can become franchise cornerstones. While the Premier League doesn’t work this way, Sheffield United and Burnley will get demoted next year to a league where they will likely be above-average teams. 

Returning to American sports, some teams take this advantage a step further by purposefully doing poorly to get a better draft pick. This strategy, known as tanking, is controversial but has been used by certain teams in already-lost seasons. Last year, the Dallas Mavericks benched their starters in the second-to-last game of the season—while they still had a slim chance to make the playoffs—in order to keep their first-round pick. They were hit with a $750,000 fine but retained the pick. The Houston Astros finished with the worst record in the MLB by at least six games in each of 2011, 2012, and 2013. This was probably an intentional strategy, as their 2013 team had the lowest payroll for any team since 2008. The rebuild was successful for the Astros, who won a World Series just four years later (and another one five years after that).

So if tanking is seemingly such an effective strategy, then why doesn’t every bad team do it? It may be embarrassing to lose, but is pride an acceptable reason to avoid probable improvement? And finally, if tanking is immoral, then why don’t leagues do more to regulate it?

Well, maybe leagues don’t need to worry much about it. While tanking sounds good in theory, it is almost impossible to implement in reality. Even if tanking has positive effects on a team’s outlook, the majority of the team is less focused on the future than the present. Pending free agents have zero incentive to purposefully play worse, and no player, not even the face of a franchise (who should in theory be the most committed to their team’s future success), wants to diminish their statistics.

Coaches and general managers are not immune to this either, as they have to worry about their own job security. In the last twenty years, there has been a clear correlation between an NBA team's success and the number of different coaches they’ve employed, which—though intuitive and logical—means that most coaches on bad teams are on the hot seat. Additionally, the leash for coaches has gotten increasingly short in the modern NBA: two-thirds of current coaches were hired in the last three years. The Milwaukee Bucks recently fired head coach Adrian Griffin despite the team being 30-13 in his first season. While he was struggling to unite the locker room, firing a coach who had won 70 percent of his games midway through his first year demonstrates just how unstable coaching positions can be. 

As a result, there’s little desire to build for the future when it’s not going to be your future. The world of sports is dog-eat-dog, and everybody is looking out for themselves. Only owners, who can’t lose their jobs, should feel any desire to tank, but they are the same people who represent their franchise, and surely they would hate the sight of a 6-43 team where nobody wants to be there. People who spend billions of dollars to buy a team are the most invested in it, literally, and they want to create a positive environment that can make their investment profitable. They want attention and an excited fanbase. As they are more connected to the business and media side of a franchise, They know—everybody knows—that losing sucks. 

Losing seasons create losing cultures. Some teams stay bad for a long time, even though that goes against the very idea of tanking. As mentioned prior, the Pistons are on course to have the worst record in the NBA both this season and last season. Twelve of the 20 bottom-five teams in the MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL were also in the bottom five last year. Focusing on long-term failure, the Sacramento Kings suffered a 16-year postseason drought before finally making the playoffs last year. The New York Jets are currently in the throes of a 13-season one. While some rebuilds start out hopeful, the reality is that most keep dragging on and on for decades.

Maybe they’re stockpiling young stars, but very few teams ever manage to make the leap from worst to first (the Astros being one of the few exceptions). The Jets have stud talent, including the 2023 Offensive and Defensive Rookies of the Year, yet like most bad teams, the talent of their star players is wasted and fails to create results. Historically weak teams have been acquiring superstars since the beginning of the draft, and yet they seldom manage anything exceptional with those players. The Brooklyn Nets proved this twice in the span of a decade, trading for power forward Kevin Garnett and small forward Paul Pierce in 2013 and creating a Big Three of power forward Kevin Durant, point guard James Harden, and point guard Kyrie Irving in 2020. Both experiments failed dismally.

The experience of winning can really help a team as it creates a virtuous cycle of success. A losing history, meanwhile, snowballs into more loss. Free agents are more likely to sign with teams with stronger histories; so are promising new coaches. In a sport like baseball, with no salary cap, worse teams generally have a lower payroll, and so are less able to pay for the free agents who are already disincentivized to join them. What’s more, the quality of the draft pick matters less than the quality of the people making that pick. Scouting and analytics are hugely important to picking the right player, and even if the correct choice is selected, that player needs to be developed by good coaches. But better teams have better staff. They have more motivated players. They have more enthusiastic fans.

Tanking strips away all that. Intentionally losing is a controversial, perhaps unethical decision. It’s impossible for everyone to get on board with. It usually doesn’t work. So to answer the question from above, no, it’s not really necessary to regulate tanking. If you’re a fan of a miserable franchise, tanking is an appealing strategy. Maybe your team will be like the Astros. But almost all of these rebuilds end in failure or persist for time immemorial. Only one of the 50 worst NFL teams of all time (by record) won a Super Bowl in the following 10 seasons, and even they did it before the Moon landing. So it should not be expected that the worst teams in the league will have a quick turnaround. Intentionally rooting against your favorite team is both painful and ineffective in practice.

At least there’s good news for the lucky fans of better teams. If one believes that tanking is morally wrong, then I’m glad to say that tankers may already be getting the karma they “deserve.”