science

Tanking

Tanking is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Tanking rather than just read about it. In short: Tanking in sports refers to the practice of intentionally fielding non-competitive teams to take advantage of league rules that benefit losing teams. Tanking teams are usually seeking top picks in the next draft, since league rules generally give the highest draft picks to the teams with the worst records in the previous season.

Key takeaways

Tanking belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Tanking to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Tanking from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Tanking in sports refers to the practice of intentionally fielding non-competitive teams to take advantage of league rules that benefit losing teams. Tanking teams are usually seeking top picks in the next draft, since league rules generally give the highest draft picks to the teams with the worst records in the previous season. Teams that decide to start tanking often do so by trading away star players in order to reduce payroll and bring in younger prospects. While the terms tanking and rebuilding are sometimes used interchangeably, there are differences between the two concepts. In rebuilding, losses may result from trading veterans for assets such as young talent, salary cap space, and draft picks. In tanking, losses are deliberately pursued as the primary strategy for draft positioning. Tanking is a much more common practice in American sports that utilize closed leagues than open sports leagues in other nations, which typically penalize poor performers using a promotion and relegation system, in which the worst teams after each season are sent to a lower-tiered league and replaced with that league's best teams. Relegation costs teams revenue and makes it more difficult for them to attract top talent, making tanking unfeasible. Tanking is differentiated from actions taken to achieve a pre-determined result in a specific contest, usually for the purposes of sports betting, thus violating the rules of the game, along with laws, which is more specifically deemed as match fixing.

Examples One of the first teams to tank was the 1983–84 Houston Rockets, who considered the season lost after starting 20–26 and decided to give more playing time to their lesser talented players in an effort to finish with the worst record in the Western Conference, which would ensure that they would advance to a coin toss with whoever finished with the worst record in the Eastern Conference for the first overall pick in the 1984 draft; the Rockets went 9–27 the rest of the way and finished with a 29–53 record to take the worst record in the Western Conference. The Rockets won the coin toss and used their top pick to draft Hakeem Olajuwon of the University of Houston. Olajuwon would go on to become one of the greatest basketball centers of all time, eventually winning two NBA championships as a member of the Rockets, and the Rockets' tactics played a significant role in the NBA’s decision to adopt a lottery system to determine the first overall pick starting in 1985. In the 1983–84 NHL season, the Pittsburgh Penguins and New Jersey Devils admitted they wanted to lose in order to get the number one pick in the draft and select Mario Lemieux. The Penguins finished with the worst record and drafted Lemieux; however, the NHL did not immediately institute a draft lottery as the NBA had and continued to have the team with the worst record pick first until 1995. Tanking did not become prevalent until the 2010s, when teams in all four major American leagues (MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL) were engaged in various forms of the practice. The Chicago Cubs and Houston Astros pioneered the practice in MLB in the 2010s, with the Astros finishing with the worst record in baseball by 6 games or more for 3 consecutive years. Both teams used their subsequent draft picks to select star players who led them to championships, as the Cubs won the 2016 World Series and the Astros won in 2017 and 2022. Other teams like the Miami Marlins, Baltimore Orioles, Kansas City Royals, and Detroit Tigers have sought to emulate the strategy by trading away their best players, with the twin goals of drafting and developing younger stars and cutting costs in order to become competitive again several years later. However, tanking is much less effective in baseball because top MLB draft picks are far less likely to succeed than their counterparts in the NBA or NFL.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Tanking

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Tanking claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Tanking before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Tanking ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Tanking

In research: Tanking appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Tanking in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Tanking is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics American football terminology, Baseball strategy, Basketball terminology, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Tanking outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Tanking in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Tanking means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Tanking out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Tanking in simple terms?

Why does Tanking matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Tanking?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Tanking.