Which just goes to show the uneven nature of development, because you could reasonably point to China just over a decade ago as a team with the potential to become a fixture of women's tournaments, and instead they stagnated and drifted backwards to end up ranked in the 40s.
But they also bemoaned that the players were no longer at university, so no longer funded to play semi-professionally. The theory was a new squad of younger players would come through. But the team of 2013 stuck around for so long that 6 players from that squad were still their best players in 2024
When @andrewnixon.bsky.social did an interview with Chinese cricket in 2014 they had just missed out on the global qualifier to Thailand, having lost the final game but gone undefeated in the group stage. One of those sliding doors moments given where Thailand went.
web.archive.org/web/20140401...
Interesting to read this piece on Chinese women's cricket and reflect on where they were and where they are. It reads like Chinese cricket is on the up, but at best they are undergoing a renewal without any results to show for it.
www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/m...
If for some reason any of you you read all of that (and apologies to my cricket followers), I have other things the NBA should consider, on the play-offs, all-star game, contracts and on-court.
drive.google.com/file/d/1eJh7...
In conclusion, you can solve tanking, or at least, create a set of incentives that don't encourage direct losing of games but do encourage sensible rebuilds.
To do so the starting point needs come back to what the draft is trying to achieve.
A question the NBA needs to ask
bsky.app/profile/howa...
The lottery would then be assigned to any team with below average points in proportion to the number of points they have.
Put together, in 2025 that would have placed UTA, CHI, MIA, BRK & MEM as the 5 highest lottery teams.
Based on this season it is arguably a more accurate representation of need.
Playoff performance is harder to measure the benefit of, but free agents gravitate to better teams, and it is more closely aligned to record.
We can hopefully assume teams would not tank a playoff or play-in game, but there are ways to focus this metric on later rounds if so
Quality of recent draft picks can be measured in financial benefits of the pick, and there is much research on this.
In broad terms the benefits are not that different to the rookie salary scale ($3.4m per win) multiplied by 4 for years under contract.
Note the top three in 2025: DET, SAN, HOU
Star Players would be measured in two ways:
- By All-NBA votes (divided by 50) to pick up the best players in the league
- By contract value over 1/5th of the cap (each $3.4m) to pick up high spending on stars
The 65 game rule should be replaced with a proportionate penalty
Salary Cap draws on the Wages of Wins, by penalising a team one draft point for each $3.4m they are over the cap ($140m / 41 wins).
It doesn't consider salary below the cap, because incentivising going below the cap is bad. There is a disincentive to take on expiring contracts though.
Your mileage may vary on the specifics, but I'd argue a fair non-tanking draft should be based on four things:
- Salary over the cap
- Star players
- Quality of recent draft picks
- Playoff performance.
A solution that looks at assets will provide a fairer draft than one based on record, as well as "solving" tanking, if there is no incentive to lose games on the court.
The solution then, is identify team advantages that translate to better results, but which can't be easily gamed.
If the draft is forward looking, why look exclusively backwards at recent performance?
Ultimately teams have three assets: players under contract, cap space and draft picks. The worst team is likely the one with the poorest assets, and that is not necessarily the one with the worst record.
Secondly, what is the "worst" team?
Does the worst record belong to the worst team going forward?
What if their best player is injured but their underlying ability is very good?
What if they've had a lot of good draft picks who will be very good in the coming season?
The Dunc'd On podcast (@johnhollinger.bsky.social) has several good episodes on tanking, and correctly identifies the point of the draft, but the possible solutions becomes much wider once you lose the assumption that record = worst
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HCl...
Firstly, who should the draft help? Nominally the "worst" team, but the draft is forward looking, locking in a player for 4-8 years. The team that had the worst record this year, is not necessarily the most "in need".
Tanking is not the problem.
Tanking is the outcome of a poor solution to the actual problem.
The actual problem is: how to improve competitive balance in the league through the equitable distribution of draft picks.
When you look at that problem, a different set of questions arise
Done for long enough you can reach the perfect solution that doesn't solve the problem.
"Don't Chase the Design" is a way of short-cutting back to the question of "what problem are we trying to solve", because each design should be tested against the problem, not the previous solution.
We have a saying at work: "Don't Chase the Design"
It comes up relatively often because when problem solving, it is common to land on what looks like the right solution excepting one or two things.
So you tweak it and that brings up a different problem.
So you tweak that, then tweak that, and so on.
As the NBA tank-a-thon gathers pace, it is interesting to watch how the remedies become increasingly complex, and decreasingly disconnected from the problem.
www.nytimes.com/athletic/705...
What follows is a long thread, that will try and get at the problem, and suggest a solution.
Not sure if you saw it at the time and my blog had gone awol, but I put some numbers around England's historic participation and performance relative to Australia in 2021 that dovetails with your thoughts.
web.archive.org/web/20220702...
As a bonus, here is a graph of all ratings over the past 25 years. There are five distinct eras of top team:
Australia to 2009
England in 2011 to 2012
South Africa from 2013 to 2016
India from 2017 to 2022
Australia from 2022
End of year ratings following the Boxing Day Test. Australia end the year as the number one side, with South Africa the big mover up from 1080 at the beginning of the year
Updated Test Rankings.
South Africa surging after the big wins in India.
Australia was expected to beat England by 132 runs and did slightly better. Noting injuries England are still closer than the ratings would indicate.
Listening to Bertus is always a good use of your time. Glas to see this podcast back after a little hiatus.
The CEO of one of the three biggest boards and one of three people appointed to a panel to consider the future of Test cricket is not really just an opinion.
The reason I can point to 12 y/o articles about it is that it has been a common view for many for a long time that fewer teams should play.
The Ashes will only matter, and therefore make money, while it remains the oldest and biggest of Test's many series. Take away that context and it is an anachronism. That's a weird choice for an Australian cricket administrator to make
Most relevantly, if the Big 3 dont want to support Test cricket outside a limited number of teams, then it will die. Not because it isn't viable, but because you cannot maintain primacy if Test cricket is a secondary priority for the majority of players.
web.archive.org/web/20160401...
That structure hasn't changed since I wrote about it 12 years ago. Most markets don't make money from their games regardless of format. If CA wants to play international cricket, and it is 80% if their remit, then they need to support those teams.
web.archive.org/web/20160401...
