With Cooper Flagg and the 2025 NBA Draft class, prepare for the return of the tank

I hope you have enjoyed the peaceful rest of the past twelve months. Because after a year-long layoff, the “T” word is coming back with a vengeance in the NBA.

Amazingly, we made it through the entire 2023-2024 season without hearing anything about refueling. Even more amazing was that this happened despite the relentless awfulness of the bottom teams in the league. As I wrote midway through the campaign, the bottom half of the league was just as bad as last season.

The Detroit Pistons lost a league-record 28 consecutive games, for crying out loud. The Washington Wizards went 15-67, including a 16-game losing streak of their own. The San Antonio Spurs had a generational talent on their team still lost 18 times in a row and 60 games in total. And the Portland Trail Blazers, no strangers to draft-motivated intentional humiliation, dropped one game by 60 points and another by 62 points, en route to a final score of 21 wins.

Luckily last year’s draft class was so bad. In almost any other season, the Pistons’ streak and its ilk would have generated a slew of overwrought, hand-wringing columns about what the draft lottery has done and how to fix it.

Get ready, because it’s coming.

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What saved us from a series of tanking accusations every time a bad team was shut down or an injured player held back was the utter mediocrity of the 2024 draft. Even casual fans understood that there was no Victor Wembanyama pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, not in a draft with little distinction between the top 10 players on most boards, and certainly not in a draft where even the first pick ( Atlanta’s Zaccharie Risacher) may excel more as a Shane Battier-esque off-ball role player than as the franchise’s centerpiece.

This season, however, it’s a completely different story. I’ve seen almost all of the top players from the 2025 draft play in person this past year, and they are Good.

It’s not just that the likely top 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 he’s comparable to the likes of Zion Williamson or Blake Griffin in other years.

There are so many guys. The quality of this draft, in my opinion, is on par with the loaded 2018 draft class… and maybe even better. By comparison, that year gave us two relative duds at the top (Deandre Ayton and Marvin Bagley) … but also produced the likes of Luka Dončić, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jaren Jackson Jr., Trae Young, Jalen Brunson and Mikal Bridges.

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

I can’t promise the 2024 class will go that deep, to the point of teams picking Brunsons, Bruce Browns and De’Anthony Meltons in the second round. But the highest level is loaded. It’s not just Flagg; at least four other players — Rutgers teammates Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey, France guard Nolan Traore and Baylor guard VJ Edgecombe — would all have been hyped as the top prize had they been in the 2024 class, and you could conceivably say the same if they were in 2022.

Even after that, the middle and back of the lottery look strong. Georgia’s Asa Newell had 17 points, 10 rebounds and three steals in the Hoop Summit game with the other players I mentioned above. He was one of the best players on the 2023 US U-19 World Cup team and hardly anything is said about him. Texas guard Tre Johnson matched Harper’s production on that U-19 team and has plenty of fans on the scouting circuit. Two foreign strikers with clear defensive qualities, Real Madrid’s Hugo Gonzalez and Ratiopharm’s Noa Essengue, both have a strong chance of moving up the ranks if scouts visit them this winter. Heck, Arizona’s Carter Bryant didn’t even make the roster for the US side’s Hoop Summit team, then promptly split them in a scrimmage the day before the main event.

There are some pretty obvious rewards for being bad this season. The NBA has reshaped 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 a terrible, terrible shame that we lost so much that spring — I’m not sure what happened — but in a league where a single star can have an outsized impact, the incentives for non-playoff teams remain clear.

The bottom three teams have the best odds of getting the top pick this season (14 percent each) and the best odds of getting one of the top four spots drawn at random (52.1 percent). Furthermore, having the worst record in the league ensures a top five pick and a guaranteed shot at one or more of the players I mentioned above.

That distinction in the top five is important; Historically, your chances of getting a breakthrough talent drop dramatically after fifth place. While that relationship has broken down somewhat in recent years (only six of last year’s 15 All-NBA selections were among the top five, and only seven in 2023), it could only be a short-lived problem. Regardless, this is still a much more affordable strategy than, say, hoping for a three-time MVP with the No. 41 pick.

This brings us to the final part of the story: will there be enough badness to cause consternation about refueling?

Oh, most likely. And while last year the terribleness of the worst teams was unintentional in several cases, this season it is a feature and not a bug. Even if the executives of some teams weren’t yet sotto voce They admit that landing a high lottery pick this season wouldn’t be that bad, but their actions have spoken loud enough for everyone to hear.

Remember, Washington won 15 games last year, traded arguably that team’s best player and used the waiver wire to sign Saddiq Bey, who tore his ACL in March. Remember, Brooklyn lost 50 games and then traded Bridges, that team’s best player, for (a lot of) draft picks. Consider that Charlotte traded two of its best players from last year’s 21 wins, used its cap room and exception money to acquire unproductive players from other teams in exchange for draft picks and selected a teenage project, Tidjane Salaün, with his lottery pick. Remember, even if Detroit doubles its win total, that still means the Pistons lose 54 games. Finally, consider that Chicago and Utah are doubly incentivized for 2024-2025, not only by the strength of this lottery, but also by the top-1o protected picks they owe from previous trades.

Additionally, consider that all of the aforementioned teams, as well as Portland, will likely acquire their few remaining quality veterans as the season progresses. As bad as they look on paper now, they will likely look much worse by the February 6 trade deadline.

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

The lottery is undoubtedly more random, and therefore the incentives to lose are reduced. But with the teams so poorly at the bottom of the standings and the players so talented as potential prizes, the great tank debate is about to experience a major renaissance.

(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletics; 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)