In 1983, the Houston Rockets brass wasn’t happy with how the team’s season was playing out, so they decided to bench starters, play their young guys and aim for the top draft pick in 1984.
It was, at the time, the most blatantly a team had tanked.
Back then, the top pick was decided by a coin toss between the two worst teams, which really incentivized being one of those two teams.
The Rockets won and took eventual hall of famer Hakeem Olajuwon.
The Rockets tank job through the 1983-84 season most closely resembles what we think of today when we talk about tanking. Over the years, as the NBA draft, draft lottery, odds and the league have changed, so too have tanking tactics, but the general idea is the same.
A bad team’s best chance at getting better is to bring in top-end talent, and the surest way to secure top-end talent is through the draft with a high pick.
The Utah Jazz are one of the latest teams to employ tanking as a strategy. As the Jazz have gone through the last three years of tanking, many have tried to compare the team’s efforts to other teams that have also tanked in order to find success.
Often, people will point to The Process Sixers. Led by then general manager Sam Hinkie, players with little-to-no hope of staying in the NBA were brought together for the sole intention of being worse than all other NBA teams so the Philadelphia 76ers could select the best available player in the draft, no matter the fit.
Others will point to the Oklahoma City Thunder, who tanked for high draft picks in 2021 and 2022, or the San Antonio Spurs, who recently secured Victor Wembanyama through tanking efforts.
But the team that provides the closest blueprint to what the Jazz have done and are doing is the Houston Rockets. No, not the 1983-84 Rockets — rather, the current Rockets team.
Time, identity, accountability, balance
Every tanking situation in the NBA is different and no path is exactly replicable. The Sixers weren’t slowly trying to develop young players that they hoped could be a part of their core while they were tanking and they weren’t picking players based on how they would play together, so it’s not like the Jazz are on the same path that Philadelphia was on in 2014 or the surrounding years.
The Jazz did not start their tanking years by trading for a future MVP-level player as the Thunder did when it acquired Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and neither did the current iteration of the Rockets.
Back in 2020 when James Harden forced his way out of Houston, the Rockets decided to lean hard into rebuilding. Through three tanking seasons they finished with the worst overall record twice and the second worst record in 2023.
They ended up with the No. 2 pick in 2021, the No. 3 pick in 2022 and the No. 4 overall pick in 2023, selecting Jalen Green, Jabari Smith Jr. and Amen Thompson, ...
