There are some big games on Wednesday in the NBA.
Atlanta visits Detroit in a matchup pitting a Hawks team that is rolling against a Pistons team trying to lock up the Eastern Conference's No. 1 seed. Oklahoma City plays Boston, a showdown featuring the two most recent champions. Houston plays Minnesota, a game that could factor mightily into Western Conference seeding.
And Washington plays Utah. A team on a 16-game slide will visit a team that would unquestionably benefit from finishing fifth or worse in the league this season.
The tanking epidemic is being discussed yet again this week at the board of governors meeting in New York. The NBA has tweaked the draft process a few times over the years, and it seems like bigger changes are finally on the way. They probably won't be finalized this week, but they're coming.
“Are we seeing behavior that is worse this year than we’ve seen in recent memory? Yes, is my view,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said last month, adding that the league is “going to be looking more closely at the totality of all the circumstances this season in terms of teams’ behavior, and very intentionally wanted teams to be on notice.”
Silver will speak with reporters on Wednesday and the big news of the day is expected to be expansion plans, with the league's governors set to vote this week on moving one step closer to adding franchises in Las Vegas and Seattle.
But once the hubbub of expansion talk dies down, tanking talk will come up. Again.
There have been three 16-game losing streaks in the NBA this season. Washington is on one now, Indiana — a team that made the NBA Finals last season, but knew this would be a reset year the second that Tyrese Haliburton tore his Achilles in Game 7 of that series — snapped such a streak with a last-second win in Orlando on Monday night, and Sacramento went 0-16 during a stretch of January and February.
“We've got to get some wins, man. We've got to keep building as a team,” Indiana forward Pascal Siakam said in the televised on-court interview after the win in Orlando. “It's been tough. It's been a tough year for us, man. It shows your character. It tests you. But that's life.”
Tanking has been a topic all season. Brooklyn owner Joe Tsai said back in the fall that the Nets — who had five first-round picks in last year's draft — are rebuilding, noting that the team has only one first-round selection this year.
“We hope to get a good pick,” Tsai said at the All-In Summit. “So, you can predict what kind of strategy we will use for this season.”
The Nets are 17-55, the third-worst record in the league entering Tuesday. In the current lottery format, that would assure Brooklyn a 14% chance — the best odds possible — of winning the No. 1 pick.
Utah got fined $500,000 last month for not using its best players in the fourth quarter of games, one of which the Jazz actually won in Miami. The Wizards' current 16-game losing streak is the fourth such streak by Washington in just over two years, a run of absolute futility matched only once before in NBA history. (For the record, in the three other instances since 2023-24 of Washington losing 16 straight games, it wins the 17th game.)
A bottom-five finish in the league standings would give Utah a 99.4% chance of winning a top-eight pick in the draft; otherwise, the pick would convey to Oklahoma City.
Jazz owner Ryan Smith, after the $500,000 fine got levied, responded on social media saying in part “agree to disagree … Also, we won the game in Miami and got fined? That makes sense.”
Agree to disagree may as well be the motto for tanking. It happens, like it or not.
All seem to agree on this: It's bad.
Some teams are out of the playoff race and are thinking about their future, which is understandable. Milwaukee is mathematically alive but needs a series of miracles to reach the play-in tournament and its best player, Giannis Antetokounmpo, has battled injuries all season. It would make sense that the Bucks don’t want to risk him getting hurt again. It also makes sense that Antetokounmpo wants to keep playing. The National Basketball Players Association said Tuesday it wants to work with the league on “meaningful new proposals that will directly address and discourage tanking.”
Nobody can say for certain when tanking — the practice of trying to lose in order to manipulate draft odds and have a chance at the best player possible — really got invented. It goes back to at least 1982, when an owner openly said that finishing last was a great idea.
The owner was Donald Sterling, the then-San Diego Clippers owner who was swiftly fined $10,000 for the remark that was caught on tape. Sterling was kicked out of the league in 2014 and forced to sell the Clippers after it was found he made racist comments.
The prize Sterling wanted for tanking in 1982 was Ralph Sampson, the superstar center from Virginia. Sampson wound up staying in school for one more season, in part because the deadline he faced to enter the draft was before the coin flip that decided if the Clippers or the Los Angeles Lakers would get the No. 1 pick. Sampson didn't want to take the risk of having to join the Clippers; the Lakers wound up winning the coin toss anyway.
Tanking didn't work then. It doesn't always work now. And yet, more than four decades later, here we are.
Around The NBA analyzes the biggest topics in the NBA during the season.
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Indiana Pacers forward Pascal Siakam (43) celebrates with teammates including forward Jarace Walker (5) and guard Andrew Nembhard, right, after defeating the Orlando Magic in an NBA basketball game, Monday, March 23, 2026, in Orlando, Fla. (AP Photo/John Raoux)
Utah Jazz Head Coach Will Hardy reacts during the second half of an NBA basketball game against the Portland Trail Blazers, Friday, March 13, 2026, in Portland, Ore. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane)
Washington Wizards head coach Brian Keefe watches during the second half of an NBA basketball game against the Miami Heat, Tuesday, March 10, 2026, in Miami. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
GENEVA (AP) — Scientists in Geneva took some antiprotons out for a spin — a very delicate one — in a truck, in a never-tried-before test drive that has been deemed a success.
If this so-called antimatter had come into contact with actual matter, even for a fraction of an instant, it would have been annihilated in a quick flash of energy. So experts at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, had to be extra careful when they took 92 antiprotons on the road for a short ride on Tuesday.
The antiprotons were suspended in a vacuum inside a specially designed box and held in place by supercooled magnets.
In methodical exercise over about three hours, the nearly 1,000-kilogram (2,200-pound) cryogenic box was craned up slowly and moved through a cavernous lab the onto the truck.
The drive on CERN’s campus itself lasted only about a half-hour to test how — if at all — the infinitesimal particles could be transported by road without seeping out.
The antiprotons were then placed back in their usual lab area, and the operation was concluded with applause, claims of success, and a bottle of Champagne.
“Transporting antimatter is a pioneering and ambitious project," said Gautier Hamel de Monchenault, CERN's director for research and computing. "We are at the beginning of an exciting scientific journey that will allow us to further deepen our understanding of antimatter.”
Manipulating antimatter, like antiprotons, can be tricky business. As scientists understand the universe today, for every type of particle that exists, there is a corresponding antiparticle, exactly matching the particle but with an opposite charge.
If those opposites come into contact, they “annihilate” each other, setting off lots of energy, depending on the masses involved. Any bumps in the road on the test journey that aren't compensated for by the specially-designed box could spoil the whole exercise.
“The motivation behind these experiments is to compare matter and antimatter with extremely high accuracy and watch for differences which we might have not seen yet,” said Stefan Ulmer, the leader and spokesperson for Tuesday’s test run.
The exercise was a first step toward making good on hopes, one day, to deliver CERN antiprotons to researchers abroad — such as at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, which is about eight hours away in normal driving conditions.
“We are scientists. We want to understand something about the fundamental symmetries of nature, and we know that if we do these experiments outside of this accelerator facility, we can measure 100 to 1,000 times better,” Ulmer said.
The antiprotons were encased in a “transportable antiproton trap” box that is compact enough to fit through ordinary laboratory doors and fit on a truck. It used superconducting magnets cooled to -269 degrees Celsius (-452 Fahrenheit) that allowed the antiprotons to be remain suspended in a vacuum — not touching the inner walls, which are made of ... matter.
To put the amount into perspective:
The mass in Tuesday's test — slightly less than that of about 100 hydrogen atoms — is so little, experts say, that the worst possible outcome was the loss of the antiprotons. Even if they did touch matter, any release of energy would be unnoticeable, only an oscilloscope, which picks up electrical signals, would be able to detect it.
To put the amount into perspective, Ulmer noted that a single grain of salt contains 10 to the 18th power — or a billion times a billion — of particles, and “we are transporting 100,” give or take.
The trap, said CERN press officer Sophie Tesauri, “is supposed to contain these antiprotons no matter what: If the truck stops, if it starts again, if it has to slam on the brakes — all that.” Work remains: The trap can contain the antiprotons on its own for only about four hours, and the drive to Düsseldorf is twice that.
Antimatter, says experimental particle physicist Tara Shears, is “one of the biggest mysteries that we have in science." It is now rare, but when the universe was created, half of it was made of antimatter.
"We haven’t been able to study it very much," said Shears, a professor at the University of Liverpool. “But it holds the keys to our understanding of what — literally — why the universe is like it is.”
Particle physicist Alan Barr said science has progressed enough that precise experiments are necessary to spot “rather subtle” differences between matter and antimatter.
“To do this, it’s useful to be able to take small amounts of antimatter from places where it is produced, like CERN, to other laboratories around Europe, where precise tests of it can be done,” said Barr, a professor at the University of Oxford.
The Geneva-based center is best known for its Large Hadron Collider, a network of magnets that accelerates particles through a 27-kilometer (17-mile) underground tunnel and slams them together at velocities approaching the speed of light. Scientists then study the results of those collisions.
But the sprawling, buzzing complex of scientific experiment is more than just about smashing atoms together: The World Wide Web, for example, was invented here by Britain’s Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. Advances as varied as touch screens and tools to fight cancer have been worked on and developed at CERN.
Heinrich Heine University is seen as a better place to study antiprotons in-depth because CERN, with all its other activities, generates a lot of magnetic interference that can skew the study of antimatter.
The university is still working on a center that can take in such antiprotons, by 2029 at the earliest, Ulmer said.
CERN's Antiproton Decelerator, where a proton beam gets fired into a block of metal, causes collisions that generate secondary particles, including lots of antiprotons. It’s billed as a unique machine that produces low-energy antiprotons for the study of antimatter.
The CERN “Antimatter Factory” is said to be the only place in the world where scientists can store and study antiprotons.
The center has been experimenting with antimatter for years, and has made breakthroughs on measurement, storage and interaction of antimatter. Two years ago, the team transported a “cloud” of about 70 protons — not antiprotons — across CERN's campus.
AP video journalist Havovi Todd contributed from London.
This image, taken from video, shows a truck transporting antiprotons in a first-ever test drive to study antimatter at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, in Meyrin, near Geneva, Switzerland, March 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Jamey Keaten)
FILE - The magnet core of the world's largest superconducting solenoid magnet (CMS, Compact Muon Solenoid) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)'s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator, in Geneva, Switzerland, March 22, 2007. (AP Photo/Keystone, Martial Trezzini, File)
FILE - The globe of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, is illuminated outside Geneva, Switzerland, March 30, 2010. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus, File)
FILE - A technician works in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) tunnel of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, during a press visit in Meyrin, near Geneva, Switzerland, Feb. 16, 2016. (Laurent Gillieron/Keystone via AP, File)
FILE - A technician works in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) tunnel of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, during a press visit in Meyrin, near Geneva, Switzerland, Feb. 16, 2016. (Laurent Gillieron/Keystone via AP, File)
