NBA catchup: Raptors push for playoffs, SGA eyes MVP

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It's been a tough season for the NBA. Despite some genuinely exciting moments — Bam Adebayo's stunning 83-point game, last weekend's marvelous Nikola Jokic vs. Victor Wembanyama overtime duel, and the seemingly endless stream of cartoonishly brilliant Wemby highlights, to name a few — the action on the court has largely been swallowed up by the tiresome tanking discourse.

In case you've ignored this issue (smart!), here's the problem in a nutshell: with an unusually deep pool of top prospects coming out of college this year, a large number of the NBA's worst teams have grown increasingly shameless about losing as many games as they can in order to boost their odds in the draft lottery. Though unsavoury, tanking is generally a smart strategy for the teams themselves because the quickest path back to contention is to draft a superstar. But the impact on the league as a whole has been brutal as more and more games turn into unwatchable blowouts. As of yesterday, according to an ESPN story on the tanking problem, the average margin of victory this season had reached an all-time-high 13.1 points, with a record 89 games decided by 30 or more.

With fans and pundits fed up with being served so many stinkers, everyone seems to have developed their own pet solution to the tanking epidemic. NBA commissioner Adam Silver even vowed to "fix" it this summer by changing the draft process. However, most of the ideas being batted around on podcasts and other forums amount to half measures as few are willing to deploy the nuclear option of simply doing away with weighted lottery odds. Heck, if