In one of the hot button issues of the present day, we encounter the topic of tanking in sports, with the NBA being in the spotlight.

What is tanking? It's the disgraceful art of sitting out your star players and playing the lower-tier players for the sole purpose to lose games in order to acquire a higher draft pick.

Say that your team is average but not quite good enough to make the playoffs. Rather than attempting to make a final push to the playoffs, they might decide to sit the star players in order to lose games. Instead of getting a draft pick in the 10-15 range, they suddenly find themselves with a top-10 pick because they happened to lose 18 of their final 20 games of the season.

Even though the NBA lottery was implemented for the purpose of prohibiting teams from tanking games, there are still teams that attempt to gain whatever edge they can by weighing the ping-pong balls in their favor. You may not be guaranteed a No. 1 spot, but you still gain a better chance of acquiring a higher pick if you lose.

It happens every year, and there are many teams that still practice this embarrassing tradition.

Let's delve into five reasons why tanking is bad for the NBA and all the aspects that are affected by a franchise giving up on everything they hoped for at the beginning of the season.

Unfair to Fans

The NBA is a business made for entertainment. All sports are made solely for the entertainment of the common folk who want to escape the reality of their own life by taking their mind off stress in order to observe a different reality.

When you pay for a product in the entertainment industry, you only expect the best out of it. You paid the money for whatever service, and in return, you anticipate that either the movie you're watching or the concert you're at will give you an enjoyable mental trip for however long that particular event is meant to last.

This includes the NBA and any other sporting event. When you pay money to go watch your favorite professional basketball team, you're expecting a hard-fought battle between two teams that are giving a complete, all-around effort with the hope that your team comes out on top. Even if your team succumbs to defeat, you still have a sense of feeling satisfied because you were still able to view a hotly contested game.

Say your a Portland Trail Blazers fan on Christmas and you open up your gift to find a ticket to an April 18th contest against the division-rival Utah Jazz. It's late in the season, but the Trail Blazers are usually fighting for playoff seeding, so you still expect all your favorite players to be in the game.

You can't wait to see LaMarcus Aldridge, Jamal Crawford and Raymond Felton, and when you get to the game, what do you see?

A starting lineup composed of Nolan Smith, Wesley Matthews, Nicolas Batum, J.J. Hickson and Hasheem Thabeet. A lineup that will eventually lose by 21 points to a team you've been bred to dislike in your house.

You were excited for months for the game, and you got a shoddy product that wasn't playing its best players. You watched a team that you knew was going to lose, simply based on the lineup alone.

The NBA, and every other sporting organization, needs to realize that the fans are what drive their business. Without fans buying individual and season tickets or memorabilia, the NBA doesn't exist. You can have all the millionaires and billionaires that own the franchises to fund the team, but it won't mean anything without the fans.

It's not fair to the fans of a team when they expect their full strength squad, and instead, get a squad composed of second- and third-stringers. Tickets for these games aren't cheap. If you're attending any type of sporting event, you're usually making a significant commitment to letting go of a large portion of your finances.

Figure in the ticket prices, parking, gasoline and food, since you're going to be extremely bored and depressed, and you're spending at least $100 on all of this. You expect a great game, yet you see Hasheem Thabeet starting at center and Nolan Smith starting at the point while LaMarcus Aldridge, Raymond Felton and Jamal Crawford sit on the bench.

This isn't just for Portland, either. This goes out to all the teams that purposely tank and let their fans down. We understand that the franchises are doing this in order to pick up a college player who may very well turn the franchise around, but it still doesn't diminish the fact that the final few weeks or months of the NBA season were spent watching an awful team that had no intention of succeeding.

Aiding Opponents in Playoff Seeding

Let's create a scenario here.

The Miami Heat and Chicago Bulls are competing for the No. 1 seed and are tied. The final game of the season will decide which team ends up getting home-court advantage throughout their conference playoffs.

The Bulls are set to play a Memphis Grizzlies team that's fighting tooth and nail for the eighth spot in the West, while the Heat draw a Houston Rockets team that's already collapsed and is purposely losing games.

Those games don't weigh evenly, do they? Obviously, the schedule makers don't know which teams are going to be good or bad by the end of the season, but they don't create schedules in respect to teams that are going to purposely lose games.

If it's the Bulls playing the Grizzlies and the Heat playing the Wizards, it's one thing, but the Bulls playing a team that will compete while the Heat play a team that's already given up isn't fair to anybody.

While we focus on the idea of tanking and all of the parties that are negatively affected by this, we tend to forget that they still have to play games against teams that actually go into the contest with something to prove. The team that's purposely losing games could care less that they lose games. However, the team that beats them by 20 points looks at the game as a huge win and possible confidence builder going into the postseason.

Yes, winning games against tanking teams isn't the greatest confidence builder, but it could be for teams that are limping into the postseason. After all, it sometimes takes one little push to get the ball rolling at full speed. Even if a struggling contender beats a team with no intention of winning, they're still receiving the confidence of gaining a victory.

Tanking teams could actually affect the outcome of playoff seeding. If they have a tough schedule to end the season, they're going to be giving wins to teams that are trying to rise in the playoff standings. All of this happens, while other teams fighting for a playoff spot may not get the benefit of playing a team without a purpose.

Pointless in the NBA

The fact that NBA teams are purposely tanking games baffles me.

Do organizations not realize that the NBA created a system that's supposed to prevent this from happening? Do they not realize that there's a lottery system specifically created for the sole purpose that a team does not purposely lose games in order to obtain a higher seeding?

In fact, the team that finishes with the worst record in the NBA usually doesn't win the first pick, which helps and hurts in a way. It helps because it prevents tanking, even though it still persists, but it also hurts because there are teams truly bad enough to finish with a record so horrific that they couldn't have purposely accomplished it.

Take a look at the Charlotte Bobcats of this year. As I write this, the Bobcats are 7-57 and are currently down by seven points to the Orlando Magic midway through the fourth quarter.

The Bobcats are 7-57 not because they're purposely losing, but because they're seriously that bad. The starting lineup that they are rolling out tonight is essentially the same as the one they rolled out midseason.

D.J. Augustin is still point guard, Gerald Henderson is still shooting guard and Bismack Biyombo is still in the starting lineup. With the exception of B.J. Mullens replacing Boris Diaw at the four and Derrick Brown replacing Corey Maggette at the three, the Bobcats are still the same team. They're not losing on purpose. That team is actually trying to win, and they're really that bad.

That's why tanking hurts this league. The lottery system may be in place to prevent the certainty of receiving a higher pick because of your record, but it also hurts the teams that are also truly that bad and need a number one pick.

The Phoenix Suns and Charlotte Bobcats will both be in the lottery this summer, and while the Suns chances to receive the No. 1 pick are much slimmer than the 'Cats, there's still the chance.

Does anybody on this planet think the Suns could use Anthony Davis on their team more than the Bobcats? Of course not. The Bobcats need that No. 1 pick, and even though they're the worst team in the league by far, they might not receive it because the NBA implemented a system that's meant to eradicate teams that are pretending to be extremely bad.

The Bobcats have 11 less wins than the second-worst team in the NBA. They need that No. 1 pick, and they might not get it because of teams that purposely lost games so much that the organization had to create a system to prevent it.

Limits the Potential of Current Roster

When you send out your starting lineup for tipoff, you're putting all your cards on the table and sending out what you believe to be your five best players.

You do this because you want to win, otherwise there would be no point to playing the game in the first place. If you're sending out a subpar starting lineup that has little-to-no chance of winning while the star players sit on the bench, there's absolutely no point of playing the game. You're not attempting to put out your best rotation and are essentially telling the other team that you're not here to win.

Isn't the entire purpose of sports in general to win? You work your butt off for years to make it into the NBA, and you're going to join a team that now wants to start losing? You've been bred your entire career to know that there is no other option besides winning, yet you're getting thrust onto a team that's telling you we don't stand a chance, and we want a high draft pick, so we're just going to not put out our best players.

It's not only hypocritical, it's painfully and morally wrong. You're limiting the roster that you're paying an unbelievable amount of money for. You're sitting players that are worth up to $15 million on the bench, so that you can play guys who are fresh out of the D-League and are just making the minimum.

The stars that you were ecstatic to see your team acquire are now sitting on the bench while five players you've probably never heard of are playing awful basketball. Once again, it's unfair to the fans, but it's also unfair to the collection of players on that roster who want to win. They might not think they're the best team, but that doesn't mean they're not going to go out every night and leave it all on the court.

NBA players may be getting paid a lot more and are a lot bigger than you and me, but they're still human beings. You can't tell me that these guys aren't demoralized on the bench when they know that their team has quit on them because they couldn't get the job done. Even if it's to rest them and not risk injuries, the majority of the players in the league would still much rather be on the court than in a suit at the end of the bench.

You do get to give young players a shot to prove themselves, but it's hardly doing much for the morale of the team. Every NBA franchise should encourage each and every one of their players to play as hard as they can in every game, yet you're also purposely taking them out of games so you can lose. The head office might not care, but the players, as competitors, do.

Dignity? What Dignity?

Once again, I return to the fans. I might refer a lot to the fans, but it's only because they make the NBA what it is today.

The players and owners can argue all they want about who gets more money. They just have to remember that a lot of the money they're arguing over was previously ours. By "ours," I speak of the fans that allow these gargantuan industries to thrive. Always remember that the entertainment industry is nothing without at least one set of eyes watching.

Some may call it crazy or even childish, but there are a lot of people who take a lot of pride in their sports teams. When you grow up a fan of one team your entire life and you're enthralled with everything about the franchise, you always expect the best out of them.

That's why there are fans of teams like the Miami Dolphins or Chicago Cubs. They might not always be good, but there's a lot of pride and tradition that rests within those franchises. There's constant disappointment and turmoil within the franchise, yet the fans of those teams will carry their allegiance of that team to the death.

Fans know when their team is trying because of all the games they viewed. They know when a bad team is either playing bad or plain giving up. No matter how bad our team may be, we will always have pride, loyalty and devotion for that single team as long as they go out every game, put the best players on the court/field/pitch/ice and play their hearts out.

When a team tanks, you're doing the equivalent of slapping your fans on the face and then throwing some ice cubes at them. When a team sends out these horrible starting lineups that are meant to lose, they're pretty much insulting their fans and then telling them it will be alright because they have the off-chance of landing a great player from college.

The head offices of these organizations always know what's best. That's why they're there in the first place. Fans may have great and innovative new ideas (where's the sarcasm font when you need it?), but they don't know everything that goes behind closed doors. The front office of every team will always have the intention of doing what's best for their team.

However, they're doing the complete opposite when they purposely tank games. Fans love to see wins, but they love seeing effort, ambition and an overall drive to win from each and every player on their team just as much.

Fans don't want to see their team lose by double digits in nearly every game to end the year. Even if their team isn't good enough to win a championship or make it to the playoffs, that doesn't mean they want to see them start losing so they could possibly gain a 19-year-old who's never played professional basketball.

That's embarrassing to them, and they essentially have to forget about the dark period that hung over their team for that end of the season.

Trust me, I'm still getting over the 2007-08 Miami Heat.