📉 The Solution to Tanking in the NBA

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I was recently listening to an interview with MLB reporter Jeff Passan, who described the attitude problem among some league owners. As he sees it, too many owners are forgetting that they’re not just running businesses but “public trusts.”

I really like this framing because it seems that, in a world of free markets and shareholder value, we’ve forgotten that it’s okay to hold some businesses to a higher moral standard.

Sports teams don’t exist merely to raise an individual's net worth (sure, it’s a great byproduct), but they’re community institutions that will outlive all of us, and should be treated as such.

And the latest casualty of a once-great sporting institution? The Chicago Indiana Bears.

In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: The Solution to Tanking in the NBA

📉 Biggest Loser: What the Hell is Going on with Curling?

🏆 Winner’s Circle: Jeter’s Gold Thong: Baseball’s Best Superstition

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🗞 The Big Story

This college student might have accidentally solved the NBA’s biggest problem with a single DM. Let me explain.

Background: In 2008, Adam Gold was watching his favorite team, the St. Louis Blues, when he noticed something about his fandom that he didn’t like: He was rooting for them to lose.

Now, unfortunately, cheering against your favorite team isn’t all that uncommon in American sports (especially in the NBA) since the more games a team loses, the better chance they have at the number 1 overall pick. However, this practice of “tanking” also leads to large percentages of teams in every league becoming virtually unwatchable by the middle of every season.

For example, this year, a depressing one-third of the NBA’s teams are actively tanking for better lottery odds, even though the league keeps introducing new rules to prevent this from happening, but what else can they do?

The Gold Plan: That’s the exact question Gold set out to answer as a Ph.D student in 2012 when he presented his idea for a new draft system at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

The way it works is once a team is mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, they immediately start earning what he calls “draft order points” for all remaining games in the season. Teams can earn 3 points for a win in regulation all the way down 0 points for a loss.

• 3 points: Win in regulation

• 2 points: Win in overtime

• 1 point: Loss in overtime

• 0 points: Loss in regulation

Then, at the end of the regular season, the eliminated team with the most “draft order points” is awarded the first overall pick in the upcoming draft.

In Practice: Now, while this idea might sound far-fetched, Adam was actually DM’d on Instagram by an executive at the Professional Women’s Hockey League at the beginning of 2024 to make their league the first to implement his plan, and it worked.

Instead of teams tanking at the end of the season to increase their chances at the No. 1 overall pick, every team was playing like they had something on the line. The PWHL even added its own wrinkle that awards the second-overall pick to the team that actually has the worst record, so genuinely bad teams aren’t totally disadvantaged by this new plan.

And honestly, after learning more about it, I think Adam might have stumbled into the exact solution the NBA has been looking for…

📉 Biggest Loser

What the hell is going on with curling right now?

Because, in less than 24 hours, the best team in the world was caught cheating twice, and it’s all because of a piece of technology no one seems to know anything about.

Let’s break it down.

Scandal: Last weekend, Team Canada, which ranks among the most decorated nations in Olympic Curling with 12 total medals, was caught performing a “double touch” when curler Marc Kennedy released the handle and then touched the granite again with his index finger.

Now, Team Sweden, Canada’s opponent during this match, must have noticed Kennedy doing this earlier in the week, because according to a few reports, they specifically set up their broadcast cameras off to the side to catch him in the act, which led to this viral interaction.

Technology Loophole: To understand what Kennedy did wrong here, it’s important to note that there’s actually technology inside each of these stones to help prevent incidents like this.

In fact, if you look closely, each curling stone actually features two blinking lights, which are connected to a pressure sensor in the handle and will blink green if the stone is released before this green line, or red if the thrower is still touching the stone after it crosses that line, which is tracked by a magnetic strip installed beneath the ice.

If this happens, the stone is simply removed from play during that round. However, it seems like in an attempt to get around the pressure sensor in the handle, and give their stones a little extra push beyond the green line, members of Team Canada’s men’s and women’s teams were pushing the granite of the stone with their index fingers, which is expressly against the rules.

However, apparently, even something as controversial as this is considered a minor penalty in the world of curling, akin to a false start or a travel call. Who knew?!

🏆 Winner’s Circle

What’s the craziest superstition in sports history?

Because I would argue that it involves one of the greatest athletes of all time and a gold thong, let me explain.

Backstory: Now, when you think of classic sports superstitions, you might picture baseball players adjusting their batting gloves or jumping over the foul line, but in 1996, Oakland Athletics’ slugger, Jason Giambi, took his superstition to a whole new level.

‘96 was Giambi’s first full season playing in the big leagues, which meant he regularly struggled with hitting slumps as he adjusted to a higher level of pitching. So, in an attempt to regain his focus at the plate and worry less about his hands or balance, he started wearing a gold thong so that his only focus was its “uncomfortable feeling.”

Now, say what you want about this technique, but for Giambi it clearly worked: he went on to win the AL MVP with the Athletics before signing a 7-year, $120 million deal with the Yankees in 2002.

But this is when the superstition really starts to get good.

Team Bonding: According to his Yankee teammates, Giambi would simply hang his gold thong in his locker for others to wear when they were in a slump; however, apparently, he would make them ask him for it before he’d hand it over.

Now, even though there are several anecdotal examples of guys like Johnny Damon and Robinson Cano asking to wear it multiple times throughout Giambi’s time on the Yankees, quite possibly the best example of the gold thong’s “powers” has to be when Yankee legend Derek Jeter asked to use it in 2004, after starting the season 0-32 at the plate.

Now, Jeter wouldn’t actually end up admitting to this story until almost 20 years later, but when he eventually did, he explained how he hit a home run on the very first pitch he saw after putting on the gold thong, which coincidentally kicked off one of the best offensive seasons in his entire career.

Whatever works, I guess.

⏱️ In Other News

• ESPN bets on women’s sports

• Why is everyone wearing giant chains?

• The NHL isn’t allowed to post hockey clips, sigh.

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👋🏻 Happy Friday!

For those of you who haven’t been following the Bears’ stadium saga, here’s the TL;DR:

The Bears want a new stadium; their four options are:

1. New downtown stadium

2. Stadium in Arlington Heights (33 miles from Soldier Field)

3. Stadium in Indiana (17 miles from Indiana)

4. Stadium in Iowa?

Now, the downtown stadium is basically dead since the Bears (who make over $620M in revenue every year) want billions in public money. However, they already own the land in Arlington Heights.

So, as a way to negotiate for more tax cuts/money, they’re shopping around the stadium to anyone who will listen, pitting them all against each other and securing the best possible terms.

Here’s an: teams should assume the name of the city they’re located in. So if they want to leave Chicago, they can’t take the name with them.