NBA Draft Reform: Can Losing on Purpose Ever Pay Off? research
Active — March 2026 · In collaboration with Prof. Timothy Highley, La Salle University
NBA teams are sometimes incentivized to lose games on purpose — "tanking" — to secure better draft picks. Prof. Highley's research group (La Salle University) proposed COLA, a draft mechanism designed to make this strategy unprofitable. A subtle loophole remains: a team could still benefit by deliberately losing to a specific opponent near the playoff boundary. Highley's paper showed this rarely matters in simulation but left open the question of whether a formal proof exists.
- Wrote a Medium article on the NBA tanking problem, which initiated correspondence with Prof. Highley.
- Built the COLA Explorer — an interactive tool showing how 25 years of NBA draft history would have looked under COLA. Highley linked it from his Substack series "NBA Tanking Is Solvable" (Part 3).
- Collaborating with Prof. Highley on a formal proof bounding how much a team can gain from the loophole — ongoing work.