In 2003, New York Times bestselling author Michael Lewis published a book entitled, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game”.

It introduced the world to Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane and his innovative and unorthodox approach to building a winning Major League Baseball roster with a severely limited budget through the application of sabermetrics. The book, and more specifically, Beane’s strategy, took the baseball world by storm and, as a result, triggered a new era in baseball roster composition in which front offices around the sport began embracing the use and implementation of advanced analytics.

However, what some of you may not know is that one of the beneficial byproducts to Oakland’s strategy was the ability to trick the world into thinking that the Athletics were a “small market” baseball club that couldn’t afford to spend excessive amounts of money on high-priced ballplayers. 

The Athletics are not a “small market” franchise. But the club operates under the guise as one in an effort to turn a sizeable profit through the combination of a cheap payroll and significant payments received from luxury tax violators like the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. 

It’s a sound strategy from a financial perspective, but less than ideal when it comes to hanging World Series banners in the modern era.

It’s at this point that many of you (OK, all of you) are probably wondering what the Oakland Athletics have to do with an NBA article on Covers. Well, the answer lies in what I consider to be the National Basketball Association’s variation of the Oakland Athletics’ “small market” parlor trick: Tanking.

Whereas, the Athletics have convinced the world that they are a cash-strapped professional sports franchise, certain NBA teams have convinced their respective fan bases that the only way for them to win is to lose… and to lose a lot.  

Look no further than the Philadelphia 76ers for proof, as the once-proud franchise that previously employed legends such as Julius Erving, Moses Malone, Charles Barkley and Allen Iverson has found a way to convince the public that it’s 37-127 record over the previous two seasons is part of a complex and well-planned “process” designed to create a championship-caliber club in the near future.

Sorry, but I’m not buying it.  An NBA roster is comprised of 13 players, so four lottery picks over the last three years combined with three or four reasonable free agent acquisitions should be enough to win at least 35 games a year in the Eastern Conference.

But the Sixers (currently 8-49), along with a handful of other NBA teams, have convinced the public that they need to lose at an extremely efficient rate now in order to win big in the future.  This process is refereed to as, “tanking,” and it’s plaguing professional basketball, baseball and hockey.

But while the process of tanking has become a disease to some professional sports in general, that’s not to say it’s without at least some benefit to the gambling public in specific.  

As it pertains to the NBA, the strategy of tanking for the primary purpose of acquiring the first selection in the draft has seen a rise in popularity over the last three seasons. So why don’t we take a look at the worst teams the NBA has served up on a platter over the last three years to see if we can find an edge when it comes to wagering on or against these specific clubs?

Since the top three picks in each NBA draft are determined by the lottery, we’ll start with a breakdown of the four worst teams in each of the past three seasons who found themselves competing down the stretch for the highest possible draft selections. However, our grand total of teams will amount to 13 instead of 12 because two clubs (Utah and Boston) finished tied for the fourth-worst record in the league during the 2013-2014 season.

These 13 aforementioned teams finished their respective tanking seasons with a combined overall record of 269-797, good for a winning percentage of just .252. But here’s where the situation gets interesting.  

If you take each of those 13 teams and combine their respective records over just the final 10 games of the season in which they were tanking, you get a record of 27-103 - good for a winning percentage of .207.  

What this tells us, to an extent, is that when it came down to crunch time - the final 10 games of the season - and these teams needed to lose at a higher rate than normal in an effort to help solidify a better draft position, they succeeded by, in fact, losing more games than they had earlier in the year.  

Now that we’ve established the notion that tanking teams lose at a higher rate during the final 10 games on the schedule than they had prior to that point, how did these teams fare against the oddsmakers’ pointspreads?

While it won’t exactly pad your bankroll to the point of a luxurious vacation in Bora Bora, those 13 tanking teams combined to produce an against the spread (ATS) record of 54-68-8 over the final 10 games of the season.  

That means if you had wagered against each of the four worst teams in the NBA over the last three seasons in each of their final 10 games, you would have won 55.7 percent of the time. To put it another way, had you wagered $110 to win $100 in each of those situations, you would currently be up $860.

Again, this approach has proven to be profitable, but not exactly lucrative. But here’s the kicker: Tanking teams have been more efficient in both losing and failing to cover the spread over the final 10 games of the season each year since the 2012-2013 campaign. Take a look:

2012-2013: 10-30 SU (.250), 19-19-2 ATS (.500)
2013-2014: 12-38 SU (.240), 20-25-5 ATS (.444)
2014-2015: 5-35 SU (.125), 15-24-1 ATS (.384)

The moral of the story? We’re just a few weeks away from the time in which we should be keeping a real close eye on the Philadelphia 76ers, Los Angeles Lakers, Phoenix Suns, Brooklyn Nets and Minnesota Timberwolves.

Even if those front offices attempt to convince us that they are “trying to win.”

*Tanking teams by season*

2012-2013: Orlando (20-62), Charlotte (21-61), Cleveland (24-58), Phoenix (25-57)

2013-2014: Milwaukee (15-67), Philadelphia (19-63), Orlando (23-59), Utah (25-57), Boston (25-57)

2014-2015: Minnesota (16-66), New York (17-65), Philadelphia (18-64), Los Angeles Lakers (21-61)

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