Huh??
Of course I have no evidence. How could I possibly have any evidence to begin with? No one has. All we know is there are plenty of teams that have zero incentive to win their games. Regarding the Lakers, they decided to trade Lou Williams for a first rounder + salary filler (Brewer). The way I see it, that's clear indication they couldn't care less about the remainder of the season.
Besides that, players will never lose games on purpose. That's not how tanking works. The GMs are the ones who make the strategic decisions (in some cases I guess head coaches may embrase the tank as well). Players are playing for their next contract. They have no incentive whatsoever to participate in all this. The fact that the Lakers players won 5 games in a row, doesn't necessarily mean that the Lakers front office wanted the team to win in those games. Not to mention, 4 out of the 5 teams that they beat were lottery teams as well.
So let's just recap your post here:
1. You have no evidence of tanking being prevalent.
2. Any transaction that does not immediately help a team is somehow evidence of "tanking". I guess the Cs are tanking because we didn't trade the #3 pick for Paul George.
3. Tanking doesn't work well anyway because the players won't go along with it.
Alrighty then.
Tanking has been the Boogyman of the Nets picks. I guess that will now apply to the LAL/PHI/SAC pick as well.
Yeah that's exactly what I wrote. There is absolutely no way to prove that a team is tanking games, unless a member of the team admits to it.
A couple of months ago, Mark Cuban admitted that the Mavs had done anything possible to lose games last season.
http://www.sportingnews.com/nba/news/mark-cuban-dallas-mavericks-news-tank-dan-patrick-show/94tzr8zysewk1nzfbw0q57nst
Ryan Gomes has admitted that the C's were tanking in 2007.
"I probably (would have played), but since we were in the hunt for a high draft pick, of course things are different. I understand that. Hopefully things get better. Now that we clinched at least having the second-most balls in the lottery, the last three games we'll see what happens. We'll see if we can go out and finish some games."
Are those examples good enough for you?
Going by your logic, tanking is rare cause no one can prove that it's not rare. Yeah, sure. Feel free to believe whatever you want mate.
It is an accurate summary of your post. And no, those examples aren't good enough. They're 10 years apart. That's neither common nor widespread.
Your insinuation is that roughly 1/3rd of the league will have great incentive to lose games somewhere around the All-Star break. Then that will cause the LAL pick to become considerably devalued. That is an accurate assessment of your point and it's refuted quite simply (and now repeatedly).
The first is unfounded speculation with more realism in a video game than it has in the real world. Players and coaches aren't paid to lose. They lose money when they do. People get fired. The locker room ramifications of accepting losing can be severe. Loss of ticket sales, goodwill with the community and business disputes with those who are buying the luxury boxes are all major consequences of tanking. It's not a simple decision and that's why it's so very uncommon. That's what made the 76er "process" so remarkably stunning - teams just don't do that kind of damage to their brand.
Then, as I've brought up repeatedly *and you've entirely failed to address) there's the limited usefulness to it. Let's use your glorious smoking gun Dallas example. Their winning percentage actually improved throughout most of the year.
End of December: .294
End of January: .375
End of February: .406
End of Season: .402
So if they "tanked" they certainly didn't do a good job, did they?
Even in cases where tanking would be far more overt and the losses piling up (and again, these cases are hard to find), mid-to-late year tanking would likely only result in somewhere around 3 more losses than normally would be expected. This isn't enough to generally cause massive changes in draft positions.