NBA Draft Reform: Can Losing on Purpose Ever Pay Off? research
Active — April 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 family of draft mechanisms 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. The mechanism family has grown to five variants; the latest, Capped COLA, was designed in response to NBA front-office feedback and is the one closest to adoption.
- I wrote a Medium article on the NBA tanking problem, which initiated correspondence with Prof. Highley.
- I built the COLA Explorer, an interactive backtester applying 26 seasons of NBA history to all five COLA variants including the new Capped COLA. Highley linked it from his Substack series "NBA Tanking Is Solvable".
- I calibrated the Capped COLA mechanism for Highley's Substack release: ran a sensitivity sweep across six MAX values, derived the per-series marginal bound (at most 45 tickets per series at MAX = 150), and delivered a one-page memo that informs the mechanism's final parameterization.
- COLA reached thousands of upvotes on the r/nba discussion thread, with upcoming coverage in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
- I'm collaborating with Prof. Highley on a combined paper covering the formal manipulation bound and a comparative analysis of all five variants. arXiv-first publication targeted for end of May.