FanShot

Truehoop - Does tanking even work?

25

Does more time help? Not much. Win 34 games or fewer in any season, according to Arturo Galletti at The Wages of Wins, and over the next decade your chances of winning more than 55 are abysmal, at just 12 percent. Think about that. A 34-win team is not bad, winning 41 percent of its games. This season's closest equivalent would be the Timberwolves. But still, a team that good has only about a 1-in-10 chance of winning 55 or more at any point in the next decade. Heaven forbid you are a truly bad team. Even given a full decade to get it done, teams have done the full metamorphosis, from the cocoon of a sub-20 win season to the contending butterfly of 55-plus wins, only six percent of the time, and again, one of those was the outlier Heat. [Broken into paragraphs for readability]