Really don't care anymore mate. It feels like I'm trying to persuade you that I'm not an alien or something. The way I see it, tanking the rest of the season is common practise among non-playoff teams. Obviously, you have a different point of view. I respect that. Let's just agree to disagree. Feel free to believe whatever you want.
You haven't even begun to persuade. You've just said the same thing repeatedly without producing hardly any evidence that supports your viewpoint. What little you've produced (LAL, DAL) was quickly debunked by the actual result of the games. So if you want to believe in conspiracy theories and widespread tanking of games, feel free but it's one of those NBA2K fantasy GM assumptions that doesn't hold true in the real world.
Wasnt the lottery itself, and other approaches before it, put in place because it's pretty common kowldge that teams were tanking?
Yes. And the lottery pretty much neutralizes the determinism that _used_ to drive tanking. Tanking was a strategy before the lottery. Now it is a gamble, with the odds stacked against you.
Every year since the weighted lottery was put in place, there are about 7 teams in the NBA with less than 30 wins (or equivalent w-l percentage in the shortened years). The variance is not much. I think the most teams in any one year with records that bad was 9 and the fewest was 4.
A telling aspect of this is that the number of teams with crappy, sub-30-win records doesn't seem to really correlate with whether a draft is projected as 'strong' or 'weak'. In recent years we've had fewer bad teams in the 'strong' drafts than in the weak ones.
This lack of correlation doesn't support the idea that teams are tanking for particular drafts.
I think that mostly that these are just bad teams.