Prepare for the return of the tank with Cooper Flagg and the 2025 NBA Draft class

I hope you enjoyed your peaceful break over the last 12 months. Because after a year-long break, the “T” word is back with a vengeance in the NBA.

Amazingly, we made it through the entire 2023-24 season without hearing about fueling. What's even more astonishing is that this happened despite the unrelenting awfulness of the league's bottom teams. As I wrote midway through the season, the league's bottom team last season was the worst it's ever been.

The Detroit Pistons have lost 28 straight games, a league record, for crying out loud. The Washington Wizards posted a 15-67 record, including a 16-game losing streak of their own. The San Antonio Spurs had a generational talent on their team and Despite it lost 18 times in a row and 60 games in total. And the Portland Trail Blazers, no strangers to draft-motivated deliberate humiliation, lost by 60 points in one game and 62 points in another and wound up with 21 wins.

Thank God the draft class was so bad last year. In almost any other season, the Pistons and their ilk's series would have spawned a slew of over-the-top, hand-wringing columns about what the draft lottery has done and how we need to fix it.

Well, get ready because it's coming.

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What saved us from a slew of tanking accusations every time a bad team was eliminated or had to sit out an injured player was the utter mediocrity of the 2024 draft. Even casual fans knew there was no Victor Wembanyama pot of gold at the end of the tanking rainbow not in a draft where there was little difference between the top 10 players on most boards, and certainly not in a draft where even the first pick (Atlanta's Zaccharie Risacher might be better than Shane Battier- good off-ball role player than emerge as the heart of the franchise.

This season, however, it's a completely different story. I've seen almost all of the top players in the 2025 draft play in person over the last year, and this is what they are Good.

It's not just that perhaps the biggest lottery prize, Duke forward Cooper Flagg, is one of the most touted prospects in years. He may not be quite in the Wembanyama/LeBron James stratosphere, but comparable to, say, Zion Williamson or Blake Griffin in other years.

There are so many guys. The quality of this draft is, in my opinion, comparable to the deep draft class of 2018… and perhaps even better. To review, this year gave us two relative duds at the top (Deandre Ayton and Marvin Bagley) … but also Luka Dončić, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jaren Jackson Jr., Trae Young, Jalen Brunson and Mikal Bridges and other.

That's four different guys who were the best player at a contender, a Defensive Player of the Year, and a guy who just scored (sorry) four firsts in one trade. And it goes from there: amazing 24 players from the 2018 class earned at least $10 million in a season after their rookie contracts expired, including undrafted Duncan Robinson and Gabe Vincent.

I can't promise that the 2024 class will be so deep that teams are betting on Brunsons, Bruce Browns and De'Anthony Meltons in the second round. But the top step is loaded. It's not just Flagg; At least four other players — Rutgers teammates Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey, French guard Nolan Traore and Baylor guard VJ Edgecombe — would all have been hyped as top prizes had they been in the 2024 class, and they potentially could say if they were in 2022.

Even after that, the middle and back of the lottery look strong. Georgia's Asa Newell, along with the other players mentioned above, scored 17 points, 10 rebounds and three steals in the Hoop Summit game. He was one of the best players at the 2023 U.S. U-19 World Cup and hardly a word was said about him. Texas guard Tre Johnson was able to match Harper's performance on this U-19 team and has many fans in the scouting area. Two overseas strikers with clear defensive strengths, Real Madrid's Hugo Gonzalez and Ratiopharm's Noa Essengue, both have great chances of moving up if scouts look at them this winter. Heck, Arizona's Carter Bryant didn't even make the US team's Hoop Summit squad, promptly splitting them in a scrimmage the day before the main event.

There are pretty clear rewards for being bad this season. The NBA has reformed draft lottery odds since my Grizzlies (I was vice president of basketball operations at the time) secured the fourth pick and Jackson in that 2018 draft with a 4-29 drive to the finish. It's terribly, terribly unfortunate that we lost so much this spring – I'm not sure what happened – but in a league where a single star can make an outsized impact, the incentives remain Non-playoff teams clearly.

The final three teams this season have the best chances of first place (14 percent each) and the highest chances of getting one of the first four randomly drawn spots (52.1 percent). Additionally, achieving the league's worst record secures a spot in the top five and a guaranteed chance at one or more of the aforementioned players.

This top 5 award is important; Historically, your chances of getting a breakthrough talent drop dramatically after fifth place. While that relationship has frayed somewhat in recent years (only six of last year's 15 All-NBA selections were top-five picks and just seven in 2023), it could just be a short-term blip. In any case, this is still a far more worthwhile strategy than, say, hoping for a chance to snag a three-time MVP with pick No. 41.

This brings us to the final part of the story: Will there be enough bad to cause consternation about tanking?

Oh, most likely. And while last year the awfulness of the worst teams was unintentional in several cases, this season it's a feature, not a bug. Even if the leaders of some teams weren't yet sotto voce While they admit that it wouldn't be such a bad idea to win big this season, their actions have spoken loud enough for everyone to hear.

Consider that Washington won 15 games last year, traded away arguably that team's best player, and used its special money to sign Saddiq Bey, who tore his ACL in March. Consider that Brooklyn lost 50 games and then traded Bridges, that team's best player, for (many, many) draft picks. Consider that Charlotte traded two of its best players from last year's 21-win tournament, used its cap room and exception money to acquire unproductive players from other teams in exchange for draft picks, and cashed in with its lottery pick Teen Project, Tidjane Salaün. Consider that even if Detroit doubles its win total, the Pistons will still lose 54 games. Finally, consider that Chicago and Utah will receive double incentives for 2024-25, not only from the strength of this lottery, but also from top-10 protected picks they owe from previous trades.

Also, keep in mind that all of the teams mentioned above, as well as Portland, will likely be shopping their few remaining quality veterans as the season progresses. As bad as they look on paper now, they'll likely look a lot worse by the February 6 trade deadline.

At least we can enjoy the rhymes this season. Say for flag. Bag for flag. Delay for flag. Drag for flag. The possibilities are endless, especially if Flagg stays at the top of draft boards. (Fail-ey for Bailey? Spillin' for Dylan? Trollin' for Nolan? We're still working on it.)

The lottery is undoubtedly more random and therefore the incentives to lose have become less. But with such bad teams at the bottom of the table and such talented players representing a potential prize, the great tanking debate is poised for a major renaissance.

(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The athlete; Top photos: Grant Halverson/Getty Images; Brian Spurlock/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images; Cameron Browne/NBAE via Getty Images; David Grau/EuroLeague Basketball via Getty Images; Nicholas Muller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)