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Tank to the Top? Not So Fast

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This was the N.B.A. season in which up became down, the sunny day was abandoned for an embrace of the rainy, and the race to the championship penthouse paled next to the joy of a tumble down the league stairs.

This past winter, nearly a dozen of the league’s bottom-feeders benched stars, traded off ambulatory role players and made more inexplicable coaching decisions than usual, all in hopes of losing enough to gain a top spot in the league’s draft lottery.

For half a decade now, the league’s smart set — those cost-benefit, God-I-love-a-good-spreadsheet analytics guys who proliferate in N.