One issue we constantly talk about is how to prevent tanking in sports. In some ways, the 2020-2021 season has put a renewed emphasis on the discussion.

The New York Jets put an undrafted corner on an island. The Philadelphia Eagles threw a game against the Washington Football team. Both teams said they were trying to win, but when push came to shove, the coaching staff purposefully lost the games (or at least made decisions which they knew would help their teams lose).

The biggest reason why that happened is the NFL incentivizes losing. The same happens in all four sports leagues. The more you lose, the better your draft prospects. That holds true for the NHL and NBA with the draft lottery. While losing the most games doesn’t guarantee you the top pick in the draft, it does give you a better percent chance of getting that top pick.

The only way to disincentivize losing is to remove the benefit of losing. Professional sports organizations need to put a system in place which rewards teams actively trying to win. The best possible way to do that is a reverse draft order process.

The first overall pick in the draft should not go to the worst teams. Instead, the team who just misses out on the postseason should get the top pick. If you’re the nine seed in the NBA, congratulations, you are now rewarded by getting the top pick in the draft. The same goes for the seventh seed in the NFL, and the third place team in the MLB Wild Card race.

Making this one change would push teams to try to win instead of trying to lose. Basically, your points at the end of the season are going to be in the playoffs with the extra playoff revenue or to get the top player in the draft. This presents no downside to trying to win, and there is no incentive anywhere for a team to try to tank for the top pick.

Another added benefit is top picks will suddenly go to great situations. We may no longer talk about Sam Darnold being a bust with a terrible franchise. We may not look at Patrick Stefan as a solid second line center instead of one of the biggest busts in NHL history. Maybe Adam Morrison finds a way to be an effective third option or scorer off the bench instead of being a complete bust.

That’s partially what is at stake here. Professional sport leagues are looking to the next generation of player, their future superstars, and they are putting them in terrible situations. Instead of putting players where they can best succeed and grow thereby helping the player and the future of the league, they are asking them to be saviors to terrible franchises.

Taking a look at LeBron James, could you imagine if instead of going to the Cleveland Cavaliers, he went to the Houston Rockets. He could have joined a team with Yao Ming and Steve Francis coached by Rudy Tomjanovich. LeBron could have well surpassed Jordan in rings by now, and to a certain extent, the NBA could have avoided their current problem of players jumping together to form super-teams.

Now, the counter-argument is that such a system would make turning teams around all the more difficult. That is true, but so what?

Chances are if you are a bad team, it is partially because of how you operate your team. Look at the New York Knicks. Obviously, if they were able to grab a Steph Curry or LeBron James, things could have been very different. That said, this organization is in the predicament they’re in because they keep making flat out dumb and crazy decisions. Getting a LeBron will never change that.

Another counter to that argument is the proposed system could help the worst of the worst. If you have more teams actively trying to win, there is a shallower market of teams selling at the trade deadline. If you’re the only team with anything to offer because you’re one of the few teams willing to move players, you can extract a higher return than you are now. Those draft picks and younger players could then be the cornerstone of the team turning it around. If a team does this successfully, they will have a good core to allow them to grab the first pick in the draft.

Mostly, we have to acknowledge any system has its flaws. Given what we have seen in the four big professional sports over the last decade or so, we need to change a system which incentives trying to lose. Instead, we need to give teams the explicit goal of trying to win games. If you do that, you’re not going to see teams actively try to lose games both in game preparation, and as we saw with the Eagles, by actively throwing the game.

It is time to start putting the best young players onto the most promising teams and rewarding those teams who are trying to do things the right way. We need to stop incentivizing losing. We need to give the top draft picks to teams who actively try to win because they have earned it.