There's no real good reason to watch a team in the NBA tank

If you're a losing team in the NBA, tanking can be seen as a chance to rewrite your story, get a great young talent, and actually start to compete. That's not always the case, and often times a tanking team is just a team that embraces a losing mentality. The Philadelphia 76ers "tanked" for a decade and it's gotten them nothing. It even started a terrible slogan "Trust the process", which ended up proving the opposite.

Don't trust the process. Not when the process is embracing a loser's mentality. Now, tanking does work, sometimes. The San Antonio Spurs and Cleveland Cavaliers tanked two decades apart and both teams landed generational talents. On the flip side, the Cavs tanked over a decade later and landed Anthony Bennett. The tank is unpredictable.

The other thing a tank is; that it is unwatchable. You can argue the merits of a tank in the NBA, as there are certainly examples of it working and not working but what can't be argued is that a tank is never fun to watch. Teams who tank aren't trying to do anything well.

They aren't trying to develop players, as if they develop them too fast, they may start to help win games. They're not putting in guys who can really make an impact on the team, as again, that may lead to wins, and the stars of the team who would help the team win usually start suffering mysterious aliments, like "shoulder impingement"; aka "swimmer's shoulder".

Due to these factors, the team usually becomes unwatchable. Sports Illustrated is trying to keep people interested in the product on the floor by releasing a new article where they give fans three reasons to watch the Jazz play, but either way it all equals sloppy basketball, which is never a reason to watch the NBA.

They cite player development, draft positioning and possibly seeing Jordan Clarkson's last game in a Jazz uniform as reasons to watch.

The problem with that is that most development happens in between seasons, draft positioning is only fun to watch during the Draft Lottery and Clarkson's last game was four days before the article came out; likely meaning we've already watched Clarrkson's last game with the club.

It's valiant to try and encourage fans to watch a deliberately bad team, but as someone who hates tanking for the sake of tanking, I can't condone watching a team that is deliberately trying to lose. That's such a slap in the face to the fans who have season tickets and after achieving a winning record before the trade deadline, to see them throw it all away over the potential of getting a Top 10 pick is just not sitting right with me.

If you don't want to watch bad basketball, you shouldn't have to. It's not on you the fan to find reasons to tune in, it's on the multi-billion dollar franchise to find reasons to get you to tune in.

One of those reasons, and the easiest of them all, is to put out a team that isn't actively trying to lose. What a concept.