Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
DOI
10.1111/coep.12705
Publication Title
Contemporary Economic Policy
Pages
1-18
Abstract
In many professional sport leagues, the worst-performing teams receive higher probability of earning top draft picks. This provides teams incentives to purposefully lose, or "tank," if they are not likely to contend for the playoffs or championships. We evaluate the effectiveness of tanking to improve team outcomes by examining the most explicit tanking case in the NBA: the "Trust the Process" Philadelphia 76ers. Using synthetic control, we demonstrate that tanking caused the 76ers to be more successful in terms of winning and operating income. However, only operating income had a plausibly positive present value when calculating discounted present values.
Rights
© 2025 The Authors.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
ORCID
0000-0001-7990-7171 (Cardazzi)
Original Publication Citation
Minuci, E. G., Cardazzi, A., & Johnson, C. (2025). Should more teams "trust the process" of tanking? Contemporary Economic Policy. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/coep.12705
Repository Citation
Minuci, Eduardo G.; Cardazzi, Alexander; and Johnson, Candon, "Should More Teams "Trust the Process" of Tanking?" (2025). Economics Faculty Publications. 79.
https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/economics_facpubs/79
Included in
Sports Management Commons, Sports Sciences Commons, Sports Studies Commons, Training and Development Commons
Comments
Data availability statement: Article states: "The data that support the findings of this study are available in the public domain: basketball‐reference.com, hoop-shype.com, and Rodney Fort's Sports Business Data at https://sites.google.com/site/rodswebpages/codes."