So...Who Invented Tanking?

december 27th 2020 the jacksonville jaguars are playing the chicago bears there's eight seconds left in the first half and chicago has the ball teams tend to spend the first half simply just trying to get any points they can so jacksonville has to keep them from even kicking a field goal so uh why is this the defense jacksonville ran with the bears can easily get the yards they need to kick a field goal to end the half which is what they did the jaguars were doing this thing called tanking where you lose on purpose because you think it benefits you two in their case they were trying to get the number one overall draft pick so they can get clemson quarterback trevor lawrence some cases of tanking are more extreme than others but at the very least you're intentionally not putting yourself in the best chances to win this is an extremely controversial and polarizing idea that spans every sport sports fans generally know tanking when they see it and the most famous times a team has tried it but they don't usually know its history what we're gonna do today is rewind the timeline of tanking and highlight some instances where you can point to a team and say they were probably tanking and take one lesson about tanking from each story because this is a really complex yet inexact science so we're gonna pick out a few examples of teams doing this over the years to highlight important tanking concepts now we're going to trace tanking back to the earliest instance we can find to eventually see who invented tanking in sports give us some time though these lessons are important for the journey and for the first ever example when we get there but first let's establish why tanking exists in the first place players and coaches themselves almost never ever tank play the clip from my jets video back there's always two obstacles to the idea of sports teams losing on purpose the players and the coaches players and coaches don't want to lose winning helps them stay around in the game and keep having jobs but organizationally a team might decide at the top of their food chain that short-term losing is in their best interest there are times when teams recognize they're probably not going to compete for a championship as they're currently constructed and want to get younger usually through trade or the draft this can be perfectly reasonable but there's a difference between rebuilding and tanking when a team rebuilds they're still hoping for on-field winning pretty soon and they usually let the process play itself out naturally tanking eliminates both of those things there's a difference between being patient slash looking to start over and losing on purpose because you think it helps you and while we're on that topic there's also a difference between tanking and just being a bad team this isn't going to be a list of every team that has ever tanked but the ones you're about to see are the best representations of it describing tanking can be a little complicated so why don't we start rewinding a little and i can show you what it looks like and what we can learn from it along the way and yes like the title promises we'll trace tanking back to the earliest instance we could find to more or less figure out who started it to the best of our knowledge let's start our journey with the 2018-19 new york knicks who it definitely seemed like we're tanking the nick's best player was a 22 year old star in the making named kristops porzingis but he was hurt for all of this season their top scorer for the year was tim hardaway jr who was putting up a solid 19.1 points per game in january of that season both were traded to dallas their next best scorer was ennis cantor who at one point in the year rattled off five straight double-doubles and cantor was so open about his love for new york that he kissed the court at madison square garden during his final game his final game was february of that season a little after the knicks just kind of stopped using him for a little while their second best scoring option he eventually got waved and that left emmanuel moody a as the team's new best scorer this was all during a stretch where the knicks lost 18 straight games by the way that same month where kanter was waived the new york daily news published an article about how nba commissioner adam silver called tanking corrosive and was sick of teams doing it what was their motivation for doing this two things they got rid of their two best players in that trade to dallas to bring in 30 year old deandre jordan jordan was very good friends with kevin durant and kyrie irving who were set to hit the open market as free agents that summer it was thought that jordan wanted to team up with katie and kyrie that next year and the knicks wanted to sacrifice immediate winning to eventually get the benefits of jordan bringing his buddies to new york and that's exactly what happened just not with the knicks with the other basketball team in new york they also looked to get as high a draft pick as possible in the very next draft to bring in one of the biggest college basketball prospects ever fortnite player zion williamson they did not get the number one pick in the draft lottery what's important about this our first lesson about tanking it doesn't always work hey remember when the philadelphia 76ers were like really bad when sam hinkey took over as the sixers gm he traded the team's only all-star on the night of his first draft then he picked a guy who ended up winning rookie of the year and then traded him away the next year they didn't even trade him for like a big time player either it's not that the players were purposely losing it's that hinky orchestrated a roster that made sure they couldn't win they were probably the most openly tanking team ever as it seemed the front office and the players kind of embraced what was going on i'm not gonna say it i'm not gonna say it say the line trust the process [Applause] the sixers in the sam hinke era were awful by design before hinky resigned in 2016 their peak was a 28-game losing streak that included the first 18 games of his final season the process got joel embiid and ben simmons to philadelphia two great players leading the charge for a championship push over five years after hinke's resignation so his vision might have been onto something but what's the lesson this time tanking is often done to land draft pieces but you still need to draft good players with those picks while hinkey was the gm the 76ers drafting had more misses than hits sure they got embiid but hinky also brought in first round draft picks nerlins noel jalil okafor dario saric and michael carter williams on draftknight none of whom ended up playing close to their expectations so even if the sixers brought in simmons and embiid they still missed more than they hit in the draft don't even get sixers fans started on markelle fultz either now let's double up here for a two for one example from 2011 to 2014 the houston astros lost 106 games or more three times they also traded away their best players and hunter pence michael bourne and carlos lee all of whom were still performing fairly well at the time of their trades in 2013 their payroll was just over 22 million dollars and they lost 111 games their whole team was paid about as much as tim lincecum was paid that year they were simply not trying to put a quality team on the field this was a franchise that had one world series appearance in their first 55 seasons so the rest of the league was probably looking at them seeing them build a team like you know nothing about that but then at about the time 2012 number one overall draft pick carlos correa was ready to reach the major leagues things turned around like it or not they did win the 2017 world series and went back in 2019. this video is not about their less than honorable tactics in getting there though it's about what they did before all that for a few years similarly the early 2010s cubs tanked they traded just about all of their good veteran players including carlos zambrano jeff samarja matt garza scott feldman and andrew kashner and they literally released their 2012 all-star brian lahair right after the season ended which is uh not common from 2013 to 2014 their payroll dropped from 14th to 23rd in mlb and their best season from 2012 to 2014 was a 71 and 91 record during this period they drafted chris bryant number two overall and acquired anthony rizzo jake arrieta and addison russell and traits all of whom became all-stars within three to four seasons of joining the organization and then once they saw some promise in that core that's when they invested in big free agent deals like jon lester ben zobrist and jason hayward as you might know all this was geared towards a push at the team's first world series win in 108 years they coasted through the season to get there then they went down 3-1 in the world series naturally that led people to count them and their efforts over the previous few years out and the cubs just said you're stupid you're the dumbest guy on this planet trying to call me out what's the lesson here the total opposite of the first lesson sometimes tanking can actually kind of work it tricks other teams into thinking it's an easy way for future success and that possibility fuels copycats are you ready for one of the wildest tanking examples we have here that lasted just one game we're moving into italian soccer in 2010 for this one lotio is a bad team at this time and roma is a good team both are rivals that play in the same city share a stadium and hate each other it is believed that lazio intentionally lost a game to inter milan so that roma could not win the league there's an incredible article in the guardian about this game that we'll link in the description about how roma just ripped both teams and their fans for this and it talks all about how the fans for both teams wanted inter to win the game it also highlighted how the energy surrounding lazio and inter milan in the past was that of mutual respect so it appears that lotzio who had no motivation left on the season was just gonna let inter win so that they could clinch being the champions not roma if you win will beat you up was apparently the fan slogan of the day from lazio fans we're kind of here to beat you up and by every indication lazio didn't even really try the article called blazio's performance that day quote one of the weakest displays of lazio's miserable season inter beat roma in the standings by two points what this tells us is that sometimes tanking can be really spiteful and petty usually in smaller doses this is not the only time we've ever seen a team play bad on purpose to be petty in the last game of the 2020 nfl season the philadelphia eagles were down by three to the washington football team with just over 12 minutes left in the game the eagles had jalen hurts who was a good young quarterback playing well and you'd think they'd try to lead a comeback through him but the eagles pulled him for their backup quarterback who sucked that game the eagles lost and they moved up three spots in their draft position but they also conveniently knocked their rival giants out of the playoff picture by letting washington win that automatically sent their rival giants home and the giants noticed this and all the way back in 1962 a spanish basketball team lost to an italian basketball team because they scored a basket in their own net on purpose to end the game and lose by two because they were afraid of letting the game go to overtime and letting the italian team blow them out this was actually considered a genius strategic move for point differential purposes and doing this became against the rules immediately after again what all of these have in common was losing pretty much on purpose because they saw a benefit in it the last couple were more for petty reasons but they still see it as a benefit anyway we're almost as far back as we can go here these next two stories are connected they're probably the two biggest tanking success stories ever and they happen within about 10 days of each other hakim alajuan was dominating at the university of houston and kinda wanted to stay in houston to play for the nba's houston rockets so while the rockets had a great young big man on their team already they made a mad dash to get good enough draft position to get hakeem in those days there was no draft lottery there was a coin flip between the worst and second worst team for the number one draft spot so to get a chance at that coin flip the rockets who started 24 and 36 through their first 60 games miraculously won just 5 of their last 21 to be bad enough to get that coin flip it worked they got hakeem and later won two championships around his hall of fame talent there's a great story we found that the rockets had a 38 year old player named elvin hayes on their team who registered just four starts in that season with the rockets two of them were in the last two games of the year where he played all 53 minutes in the first and 35 in the second they said it was to get his career minutes total to exactly 50 000 on the dot for some reason but in that final 21 game stretch one of the teams they lost to was the utah jazz the jazz coach outright said they were losing on purpose considering he saw them up close and as a former nba coach of the year his judgment holds weight here at the same time in 1984 the pittsburgh penguins tanked pretty openly they had been to the playoffs four of the last five years with good players on their team but decided to go for one of hockey's biggest prospects ever in mario lemieux problem was the new jersey devils were doing the same thing they raced to the bottom pittsburgh won drafted lemieux and long story short he now literally owns the team wonder if that worked out there are two really good articles about this saga on hockeygraphs.com with a ton of data showing how these tanks played out that explain the story way better than i can so those are linked in the description if you'd like to know more what these two tanks had in common was that both teams went after a specific guy and that leads into a big lesson about tanking tanking is driven by circumstances most commonly this means teams see an opportunity to go after a specific guy in the draft or more simply the opportunity to lose for some kind of benefit there teams don't tank for fun they tank because they have some actual tangible goal with it the rockets tanked for akim the penguins tanked for lemieux the jaguars tanked for lawrence olajuwon and lemieux are human representations of those goals and they worked perfectly guess what guys we are finally here the earliest example of tanking we can find and this story shows every lesson we've covered today in one and you want to know something crazy the inventor of tanking is not a team it's just a dude boxer jake lamotta you might have seen a true story about him a movie called raging bull i feel compelled to show you this part of raging bull where they just zoom in on a mug handle for what looks like no reason i didn't edit that clip that's how it is in the movie but back to how jake lamotta might have invented tanking november 14th 1947 jake lamotta is fighting billy fox he admitted he lost this fight on purpose he did this for a pretty big reason a guaranteed chance at a title fight he literally paid the mafia to do this too it's not like he was throwing a fight for money it was the exact opposite jake lamotta lost on purpose for a long-term chance at a championship that's pretty much tanking in a nutshell the circumstances were there he saw the right guy to go after the path he took was kinda taking the easy way out to spite a system he didn't think was giving him a good chance naturally it wasn't exactly smooth sailing along the way as he did lose a fight and had to wait well over a year for his shot but he ended up winning his championship basically everything we've analyzed about tanking is in that story and it's the earliest sports example we could find of a sports person losing to increase their chances at a championship not losing on purpose for something like money he held the title he tanked for for just one more fight tanking is an extremely complicated subject sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't as the journey we went on shows there are a lot of things that go into it and come out of it losing on purpose is usually not fun for those who love and support you so it's naturally very controversial and it can lead into a whole nother debate about if you're mistreating your players or your fans by doing this but we bet you didn't know that it might have first been done in a movie by robert de niro still not over this mug handle by the way myself

Channel: Stark Raving Sports

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Keywords: Stark Raving Sports, Baseball, Sports, stark raving sports youtube, youtube stark raving sports, stark raving sports, sports, sports entertainment, sports educational, sports analysis, sports news, sports opinion, mlb, nba, nfl, nhl, football, basketball, hockey, soccer, fifa, tanking, tanking nba, tanking mlb, tanking moments, sixers tanking, trust the process, 2017 astros, 2016 cubs, knicks tank, tank

Id: il78oycm9Mc

Length: 17min 45sec (1065 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021