If you’re looking for bang for your buck this holiday season- or anytime really- save your money instead of checking out an NBA game.  With ticket prices where they are today you might as well finish off your Christmas shopping or go all in for something special for yourself. Chances are great that doing so will actually cost less than attending a professional basketball game in an arena near you.

For the sake of hypothesis let’s keep this local. Let’s assume I am a hardworking father in an All-American family of four and that this weekend I’d like nothing more than to take the family out to root the Milwaukee Bucks on. Assuming it isn’t snowing out and that I don’t care about the Bucks 11 game losing streak, I arrange to buy tickets for their next home game. Now, it’s a special outing so we don’t settle for nosebleeds ($15-$30 per person) and I get four seats in the lower bowl. The cheapest ones run for $58.80.

So off to the aging Bradley Center we go. The arena itself has been condemned by the incoming NBA Commissioner Adam Silver who has given Bucks owner Herb Kohl five years to build a new arena or face relocation.

After paying $20 for parking and $50 to get dinner for the family we settle in to our seats. I start to believe that maybe we made a nice investment here. It seems like a great holiday gift to the kids and a worthy family night out.

Then the game starts. Little did I know, the Bucks are one of the worst teams in the NBA. I knew they had been struggling. I had no idea it was this bad. I ask the guy sitting next to me what the deal is with the team. He tells me the Bucks are one of about 20 NBA teams that are “tanking”. I have no idea what that means. He explains that “tanking” is when a team gives away any good players it has, fires a decent coach and makes inexplicably horrendous front office decisions in hopes that the team will be bad enough to get a great draft pick. Because the NBA uses a lottery system rather than just going by the team’s win-loss record, as the NFL does, it is a total crapshoot. There is no way to guarantee ones-self a top pick in the draft. An NFL team that goes 2-14, for example, is pretty much ensured it will get the number one pick in the draft. But an NBA team could have the worst record in the league and end up with, say, the fourth pick in the draft because of the lottery system.

Ultimately, the losers are the fans- especially season ticket holders. They pay an arm and a leg for their seats every year just to watch what is essentially a glorified AAU basketball game. I feel terrible. My kids are bored, my wife keeps looking at her watch.  The Bucks have zero players whose names I recognize. Even worse, they are down by thirty points at halftime. There is virtually no one else at the game. The players look totally lost. The coach is staring blankly out into space. In order to make up for the lack of noise-making fans the Bucks are absolutely blasting annoying music out of the P.A. to the point where I can’t even hold a conversation with my family sitting right next to me. This is horrible. We leave after the third quarter, as the Bucks are now losing by 36 points. I can’t believe I just spent over $300 on this.

For the same price I just wasted on this throwaway NBA game I could have been most of the way to buying a new Xbox one or Playstation 4. Things that could have been enjoyed for far longer than an hour and a half.

Enough of the hypothetical family of four. In real life, the situation is far worse. The NBA has become such a corporate entity that prices are jacked up beyond what is reasonable for normal, everyday people. Despite being one of the absolute worst teams in the League right now, the Bucks are still in the top half when it comes to the price of game tickets.

Last season, the NBA enacted a new tax called the luxury tax. The intended concept was to financially tax teams that stacked their rosters with superstar players. It was in response to Lebron James going to Miami, Carmelo Anthony to New York and so on. Unfortunately, those markets are huge as are those superstars. The owners of those teams are fully willing and able to pay any luxury tax to keep those stars in town. Smaller market teams can’t afford to do so.

The Oklahoma City Thunder are a prime example of the pitfalls of doing what Milwaukee and a dozen other teams are trying to do. The Thunder were a bad team that had great front office management. They had several poor seasons in a row but hit home runs on every single draft choice they made. They put together the NBA’s finest young team.  It was a team that galvanized the small market of Oklahoma City. Led by the mercurial Kevin Durant and the hotheaded, gun-blazing Russell Westbrook, the Thunder were one of the most popular teams in the league. They had James Harden and Serge Ibaka, two NBA All-Stars as well. But when the NBA enacted the new luxury tax, the Thunder balked. They didn’t feel like they had the money or market size to be able to afford the luxury tax. Therefore, they made a highly controversial move by trading 23 year old James Harden to the Houston Rockets for essentially nothing. With Harden, the Thunder had no ceiling on how good they could have been. Without him they are still a very good team but not a team that could ever hope to defeat the Miami Heat or even some of the other elite teams in the NBA. Now, they face the prospect of Kevin Durant’s impending free agency in a couple of seasons and the reality that they may be forced back to the drawing board if he were to leave. Then the tanking process would start over again.

I believe that just like they have a luxury tax to punish teams for basically being too good, they should have a polar opposite tax in place to punish teams that are clearly tanking.  I think that an NBA team that finishes the season with under 20 wins should have to be taxed. The tax should be based on how many games below .500 a team is. So, if a team goes 14-68 it would be 27 games below .500. They should therefore have to refund their season ticket holders %27 of the price of their season tickets. Why the season ticket holders? Because the NBA’s slogan used to be “It’s Fan-tastic.” There’s nothing fan-tastic about watching a team win 14 games. Also, it is one thing to just be bad. A 30-52 team is bad. But a team that goes 13-69 or 15-67 just has idiotic people running it and should be financially punished for it.

It would be interesting to see how many teams tanked if they faced the same financial pitfalls as a team does for having too many good players on it. It is complete nonsense to punish a team for putting together an elite roster and reward a team that is intentionally bad.  In what world does it make sense to punish the people who have a good product?

If nothing changes, the NBA faces the prospect of more half-empty arenas populated by corporate suits while the families it once attracted just stay home.