Are Pelicans a non-tanking role model? Scouting Nets’ Wolf, Arkansas’ Acuff Jr.

I assure you, this is the only time you’ll hear me say these words this season: Thank God for the New Orleans Pelicans.

In a season where tanking has come to dominate the discussion, the Pelicans have bizarrely become the model for what a better world might look like.

I’ll get to a deeper explanation in a second, but first, let’s start at the top, with the five most important words anyone will tell you about tanking:

Nobody wants to do this.

Not the execs, not the coaches, not the fans and certainly not the players.

Nobody.

That’s the thing about tanking that gets lost a bit in the discussion: This idea that somehow, somewhere, there are people who enjoy watching their team get its brains beaten in. Sure, they might enjoy the long-term results of the nightly humiliations, but I assure you they aren’t having any fun in real time. Nor is anyone else in the arena, except perhaps the opponent.

Look, I’ve been an exec on a team in that position. You think it’s fun rooting for your team to play “well” but somehow still end up with fewer points than the opponent? Or to ask a key player to put his feet up for a few days and make sure that nagging hangnail fully recovers? Or to worry about whether your coach will play his crappiest players enough to ensure a needed L?

It’s anathema to everything this league of (mostly) psychotically competitive people has ever done.

Anyway, this thought struck me after our reporting this week on NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s Zoom call with league execs, during which he told them their coaches “don’t want to do this.” (This is consistent with my colleagues’ reporting. At least one exec told me this week it was by far the most fired up he’d ever heard the mild-mannered Silver.)

Of course, Silver is right, but he’s missing the point: The execs don’t want to do this either! Nobody wants to do this! They’re doing it because the systemic incentives to do so at the moment are so strong.

This is one of many reasons why tanking sucks, and why reform is so necessary.

Amazingly, it took this long for the tanking frenzy to get this out of control. We’ve had tanking before, but it’s unprecedented to have eight teams out of 30 essentially punt on their season at the trade deadline and go “L in” on losing.

Partly, that’s a slow-motion realization of how important high draft picks are in powering rebuilds. The extreme actions of “The Process” by the Philadelphia 76ers made it more socially acceptable for other clubs to pursue the same path.

But it’s also the result of a perfect storm unique to this season, one that has made the tanking efforts even more egregious than the 2022-23 season when Victor Wembanyama was a generational prize.

The thing people don’t always realize is that a truly Hunger Games-esque tanking race requires two different components.

First, is the draft class worthy of tanking? Everyone gets that part.

However, the second, less well-known piece is that there must be some “race” that incentivizes teams to outdo one another. The NBA thought it had solved that problem after 2018, when it flattened the draft odds for the league’s three worst teams and made the fourth-worst team’s odds not much different.

In particular, the 2023 Wembanyama draft seemed a positive case study. With only three truly bad teams in 2022-23 in Detroit, Houston and San Antonio, there wasn’t that much incentive for other teams to pull the rip cord. By midseason, it was obvious nobody was catching them, and Charlotte was locked in with the fourth-worst record as well.

While that season had a few shenanigans — most notably, Portland debasing itself with a 2-15 finish to secure the fifth-best odds, including losses by 22, 24, 28, 34, 40 and 56 — the general sentiment was that if the new lottery odds could survive a Wembanyama draft, it could survive most other seasons.

Wow, was that wrong!

It was because the extent of tanking depends heavily on the number of potential tankers. With nine teams all but eliminated from the playoffs relatively early this season and eight of them owning their own picks, the “race” for those three slots with the best odds became more competitive.

Six teams have fewer than 19 wins as of Tuesday morning, and while the Sacramento Kings have a commanding, um, “lead” in this race at 13-46, the other five are within three games of each other. Lingering not too far away and hoping to leapfrog them are a 20-win Dallas team and a 21-win Memphis squad. With bangers such as Memphis-Indiana and Utah-Washington coming up on the schedule, the race for the best odds sits on a knife-edge.

Making matters worse, two of those teams also owe top-eight protected picks that don’t roll over after this season. Washington and Utah have a double incentive to tank this season, because it’s not just about the difference between a high lottery pick and a slightly lower one. It’s the difference between a high lottery pick and no pick at all. They can only assure themselves of keeping the pick if they finish with a bottom-four record, although staying in the bottom six will give them 96.2 percent odds.

So that’s how we’re here, but fortunately, we have a fine counterexample of what life would be like with meaningful reform.

Yes … the Pelicans. Because they already traded their draft pick, they’re showing the entire NBA what the end of a lost season is supposed to look like.

New Orleans isn’t good, but they’re playing real, competitive games while genuinely building something better for next season.

At times, it looks a bit like what a tanking team would do. Yes, mistake-prone youngsters such as Jeremiah Fears and Derik Queen are getting more run and longer rope than they would if the Pels were battling for a playoff spot. Yes, sometimes players with nagging injuries sit out rather than push too hard. And yes, sometimes the Pels are conducting weird experiments with lineups that have no guards and three centers, to see what happens.

However, at other times, it’s the opposite of a tanking strategy. Instead of shutting guys down, the Pels have Dejounte Murray returning from a year-long injury this week. Zion Williamson has played 32 straight games. After missing the 2024-25 season with a torn ACL, Saddiq Bey is hooping, having a career season and is one of the league’s best stories. Recently promoted two-way Bryce McGowens might be a legit rotation player; he had a monster dunk and three 3s in Saturday’s win over Philadelphia.

Yes, I said win. The Pels are a respectable 7-9 in their last 16 games, including wins over San Antonio, Minnesota and the Sixers. Does their opponent need to show up and play well to beat them? Yes. And thus, does their presence on the schedule make a mockery of the playoff race? No.

And, I’ll add: Can you imagine how much worse this would all be if the Pelicans hadn’t traded two likely lottery picks to get Queen in June? They’d be tanking too, and that would put pressure on all the other tankers to tank even more, and then … yeah. It would be ugly.

Instead, the Pelicans are the road map. All anyone wants is for lottery teams to act more like the Pelicans and less like the other eight teams who are egregiously gorging on Ls. (Let’s not make a show of saying one team is more guilty than the other. Everyone is doing this, everyone is all in on it, and they all should be doing this based on the current incentives.)

And that is why dramatic lottery reform is the only solution. There are many unique proposals out there, and I’ve already reported on a few of them. Big picture, by either dramatically flattening the lottery odds or by rewarding winning rather than losing after a certain point in the season, the league can ensure that tanking is relegated to the dustbin of history.

When it happens, we can all smile and repeat: Thank God for the Pelicans.

Rookie of the Week: Danny Wolf, 6-11 PF, Brooklyn

(Note: This section won’t necessarily profile the best rookie of the week, just the one that I’ve been watching.)

Speaking of tanking teams, I got to see Brooklyn in Atlanta on Sunday. The Nets played a mostly ethical game before face-planting in the last five minutes.

Brooklyn is integrating five rookie first-round picks right now, and they have had varying levels of success. Guard Ben Saraf is in the G League, wing Drake Powell is an occasional energy guy who needs to improve his skill level and guard Nolan Traore was the key tank commander in Atlanta’s game-ending 24-2 run on Sunday.

On the other hand, Egor Dëmin, who was the eighth pick, has started 42 games. And Wolf, the last selection of the five at No. 27, might be the other long-term keeper of the bunch.

I was somewhat skeptical of Wolf’s NBA translation because of his high turnover rate at Michigan and an iffy 3-point shot, but his first season at the pro level has provided a bit more confidence on both.

Wolf has only made 31.6 percent from 3 thus far, but he looks comfortable letting it rip (8.8 tries per 100 possessions), and the threat of the shot helps open the floor for his ball skills. On the turnover front, he’s averaging nearly two assists for every miscue, and his 11.9 percent turnover rate is reasonable for a rookie forward.

Moreover, the “Wolf of Wyckoff Street” has become something of a positional chameleon for the Nets, offering some secondary rim protection with his size but having the mobility and handle to play at either forward spot. He hasn’t played quite as often as Brooklyn’s rookie guards because the Nets have much better options in the frontcourt (forward Michael Porter, Jr. and centers Nic Claxton and Day’Ron Sharpe are the three best players), but his minutes have been solid.

“He’s been playing at the backup center lately because we were missing Nic,” said Nets coach Jordi Fernandez, “and he’s capable of doing it, and teams have to be aware of his playmaking and shooting.”

“(But) for the most part he’s played (as a) four/three. But the good thing with Danny, I think he’s a basketball player, right? With size, I think size is very important in the NBA. And he can keep bodies in front defensively; he’s good there. He can rebound well and then offensively (his) playmaking and shooting.”

Even while not shooting well, Wolf has handled a relatively high-usage role (20.1 percent) as a rookie. His rebound rate is solid for a four, and he can pass with some sizzle. A PER of 12.2 and a minus-2.5 BPM for a rookie season aren’t signs of impending greatness, but they’re positive indicators of rotational value, especially given how much offensive load he’s taking.

The next hurdle is making shots. Wolf needs to get more accurate both from 3 and inside the arc (just 47.6 percent on 2s with a modest free-throw rate) to be more than a useful multi-positional minutes sponge. However, as the Nets pivot toward winning games a year from now, he seems the most likely young player to join Dëmin in the rotation in 2026-27.

Prospect of the Week: Darius Acuff, Jr., 6-3 Fr. PG, Arkansas

Every week, it seems another freshman in this unbelievable class establishes himself as a dude for the 2026 draft, a no-brainer lottery pick even in what seems to be the deepest crop of one-and-dones in memory.

This week, it was Acuff’s turn. While he had steadily gained fans over the course of the first half of the season, his 49-point eruption in a double-OT loss to Alabama on Wednesday was the exclamation point. Acuff bombed 3s, got to pull-up middies with ease and blew by defenders to the rim when they crowded him. He shot 6 of 10 from 3 and 11 of 17 inside the arc, while also drawing 12 free-throw attempts.

In doing all that, he committed just one turnover. His mistake-free play of late has been outrageous — over the past three games, he has 100 points, 17 assists and two turnovers. Two!

In terms of the eye test, two things stood out to me in his performance against Alabama. First of all, Acuff’s shooting is far beyond expectations. He’s shooting 44.1 percent from 3 and backs it up with a solid 80.0 percent from the line. He also gets great elevation on his jump shot, making it more likely to be a go-to weapon even at the next level. There’s a big difference at the NBA level between being an average-to-good shooter and a panic-inducing 40-percenter. Acuff might be good enough to be the latter.

The second thing is the ease with which he gets his paint points. Tough shot making can be alluring, but it often doesn’t translate to the next level. The “easy button,” so to speak, is a much more reliable indicator of NBA-starter talent. Acuff’s blow-bys and glides to the rim in the Alabama game weren’t as frequent as his jumpers, but when he decided to get to the rack, he had no problem generating a layup.

In a loaded draft, scouts will be nitpicking Acuff’s game, so let’s go there. While he doesn’t stand out as a poor defender, his defensive stats for a prospect of this level are quite underwhelming; you’ll rarely see a lottery guard prospect like this with such a low steal rate (just 1.2 per 100 possessions). For a player of his size and athletic pop, a 5.0 percent rebound rate is pretty shocking, too.

Nonetheless, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where Acuff isn’t one of the 14 best players available on draft night, and he’s making a great case to move into the top 10.