In the good old days, if you were the GM of a sports team, you improved your team by making incremental upgrades — swapping out declining players for improving ones, developing younger players and making savvy contract decisions, both with regard to your homegrown talent and in free agency. The logic was that you’d start badly, but given enough time and good development, you would eventually end up as a contender.

Those days have come and gone, however, as teams have hit upon a new “get rich quick(er)” scheme — tanking. The premise is simple — the worse your team is, the higher your draft pick, and given the tightly enforceable (and cheap!) contracts that are given to drafted rookies, in addition to the significant talent that is available at the top of each year’s draft, you can (theoretically) put together a cheap, deep and talented roster. All it takes is a year or two of shameless losing.

And shameless you really have to be, because it takes a lot of guts, confidence and job security to tell your boss (a very rich and powerful owner) that you will be doing your level best to lose for a few years. In baseball, where talent has to be developed over time, this strategy is less prevalent, because any gains from losing are not immediately reapable — the drafted player(s) have to filter up through farm systems and earn their playing time on major league rosters. In hockey, the tangible impact a superstar has cannot be well-quantified, since fluidity of play and line rotations mean that your prized rookie might only be on the ice for a third of a game. In the NFL, although the path to winning a high pick is easiest (just lose a bunch of games; there is no randomness involved), there are 11 players on each side of the ball on the field at all times. This makes the impact of a single player, who has a single position and will be on the field roughly 50 percent of the time, not always worth the price of admission (alienating your fanbase and butchering your roster to lose more effectively).

But in the NBA? There are just five players on the court at a time for each team, and the impact that a drafted superstar can have is enormous. As such, the tanking problem rears its head most significantly in this league. The benefits of tanking well are best shown in the Oklahoma City Thunder, who shamelessly gutted their team back when they were the Seattle SuperSonics, lucked into Kevin Durant, moved to OKC and continued the tanking in earnest, drafting Russell Westbrook, James Harden and Serge Ibaka in quick succession. Today, they are among the most talented teams in the entire NBA, their current position outside the Western Conference playoff picture notwithstanding. But every team that goes down this route tempts fate in one major way — there is no guarantee that the players you pick will pan out.

Think of all the players taken early in the draft who have bitten their respective teams in the behind; just off the top of my head, I’ve got Greg Oden, Bismack Biyombo, Jonny Flynn, Darko Milicic…if I actually went through previous drafts and looked at each player taken in the top 10, I’ll bet only about five out of those 10 actually became serviceable starters, and only about one out of 10 even approached elite status. The odds are not in your favor to pick a player who can have a meaningful impact on your team. Just look back at this year’s draft. Widely touted as one of the best in recent memory, as of right now, a fifth of the top 10 is recuperating from serious injuries, and the remaining four-fifths has looked overmatched, undertalented and hopelessly lost in the speed of the NBA game. The point is, having high lottery picks in the draft isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card — there is always an element of chance involved.

Now, I’m not here to claim to have an idea that beats tanking. I’m well aware of the fact that one of the worst fates is to be stuck in NBA limbo, that scary region where you are good enough to make the playoffs consistently but not good enough to make a run for the title. In the NFL, and other single-game-outcome sports, an undertalented team can get hot at the right time and win a championship because the sample sizes are so small — a team plays three or four games in the playoffs and that’s it. In the NBA, talent usually doesn’t lie — each round of the playoffs consists of at least four games, so any aberrations get smoothed out by regression to the mean. In the NBA, you’re either on top or getting worse, with no in between.

Think about the Atlanta Hawks before this year — with a core of Joe Johnson, Al Horford, Josh Smith and a rotating supporting cast, they never managed to get out of the first round. Their solution was to blow everything up, and after one and a half terrible years, they are currently tearing up the Eastern Conference behind a team sans any true superstars! Jeff Teague, Kyle Korver, Al Horford…individually, none of these players strikes true fear into your heart (except Korver, who could probably nail a three from half court while blindfolded with his left hand). But under the manic offensive system that Coach Budenholzer has installed, the Hawks are running riot through their schedule and look to be a true contender.

This success is atypical, but the Hawks reconstructed themselves without ever really tanking, preferring to invest in fairly-priced proven commodities on the free agent market and in overall team depth. They aren’t a “major market” team with living situations as desirable as Los Angeles or Miami or Chicago, they aren’t a historic franchise like Boston and they haven’t been a traditional free agent puller. But winning cures all ills, and I’m sure that next season the skilled ring-chasers will be lining up to play in Atlanta.

I use the Hawks as an example only to illustrate that tanking is not the only way to spark a moribund franchise back to life. You don’t always have to bottom out to get better! There is a way out that doesn’t involve butchering your roster and engineering clever ways to lose. Just engineer clever ways to win, and do a better job managing your finances and your rosters. It might be harder intellectually, but nothing is harder visually than watching a team sporting D-League talent getting massacred night in and night out.

To the 76ers, the Timberwolves, the Celtics, the Lakers, the Knicks and other cellar-dwellers — please stop tanking. It doesn’t have to be this way.

For more of Coach Viggy’s pleas for decency, contact him at viggy ‘at’ stanford.edu.