With just a couple weeks left in the regular season, there are two races going on simultaneously in the NBA. One is for postseason seeding, as teams jockey for positions and the all-important top-six spots in each conference that guarantee a first-round appearance. The other is for lottery odds, as teams have been aggressive tanking their way to the bottom this season in hopes of landing the No. 1 overall pick and the chance to select Duke’s Cooper Flagg in June’s NBA Draft.
There are levels to the tank race, as some teams waited until after the All-Star break to pull the plug — most notably San Antonio after losing Victor Wembanyama for the season — while others have been putting in the work all season. Despite the best efforts of the Spurs over the last two months, there is a pretty clear breakaway with the seven worst teams in the NBA.
Teams like the Jazz and Wizards aren’t new to this, they’re true to this, and have been planning their own demise on the court for more than a year in hopes of landing a franchise cornerstone in the 2025 NBA Draft as part of a long-term plan. Others, like the Pelicans and 76ers, didn’t plan on being as bad as they have been, but have embraced their fate for this season and are hopeful to bounce back next season with a young star, better help and better injury luck.
As we move ever-closer to the end of the season and the May 12 Draft Lottery, I wanted to take a look at the players on each of those seven teams that have been the most valuable to their team in terms of collecting ping-pong balls — and which players have provided the greatest internal resistance to their team’s tank efforts.
My methodology was fairly simple: Using NBA.com’s stats site, I looked at each team’s 50 most used three-man lineups. For each unique three-man lineup that had a net rating of -10.0 or worse, a player got a point. For each lineup that had a net rating of 1.0 or higher, they lost a point. I’m sure this isn’t a perfect system, but I felt that a net rating of -10.0 was a pretty good indicator that…
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