There's a simple plan to end tanking — will more leagues try it?

This is an excerpt from The Buzzer, CBC Sports' daily email newsletter. Get up to speed on what's happening in sports by subscribing here .

We're now a few days into the NBA playoffs and, while things are not going well for the Toronto Raptors, it's been great to finally see highly competitive basketball on a nightly basis after a tedious regular season marred by tanking and an annoying amount of blowouts.

Tanking — the practice of deliberately fielding a bad team in order to improve your draft position — is nothing new, of course. But it reached a crisis point this season. With a deep pool of prospects set to enter the NBA, an unusually large number of teams seemed to be trying to lose as many games as they could for a better shot at a top pick. As a result, the average margin of victory this season ballooned to a record 13.3 points while a whopping 96 games were decided by at least 30. That was 16 more than the previous high.

This turned off a lot of fans and media members, who spent much of the season complaining about tanking and coming up with ideas on how to stop it rather than focusing on the amazing play of superstars like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Nikola Jokic and Victor Wembanyama or other more fun topics. Tanking became such a drag that NBA commissioner Adam Silver vowed to "fix" it this summer by altering the draft process, and three anti-tanking concepts were leaked last month. 

Each of the proposals is fairly complicated, and yet they share an obvious problem: even though they decrease the chances of the very worst teams landing the No. 1 pick, they still give these bottom-dwellers better lottery odds than the less-awful teams. So the incentive to lose games once you fall out of playoff contention