Your sport isn’t acting sensibly if situations arise — every year — that make losing more appealing than winning.

Again, it is happening in basketball. Both in the NBA and in NCAA Division I.In the NBA, a batch of teams have no chance of making the playoffs. None Including the Clippers. And for those dead-and-buried teams, every game they win down the stretch reduces their chances of getting the top draft pick in the coming draft. “Tanking” clearly is the way to go, and some teams are good/bad at it. The Miami Heat this year, the Milwaukee Bucks last …

In college basketball, the phenomena of conference playoffs can be entertaining. They offer crummy teams a chance to catch lightning in a bottle, make a run and grab the conference’s automatic playoff bid.

But they also can offer nothing but trouble to elite teams.  Basically, the top half-dozen teams, none of which were going to lose a top-two-in-a-regional placing in the NCAA Tournament bracket regardless of how they did in the conference tourney.

North Carolina is playing today, and will be a top regional seed whether it wins or loses. Same as two games ago.

UCLA will be a top regional seed because it won the Pac-10 tourney. But the Bruins would have been no worse than a No. 2 seed (and likely still a No.1) if they had lost in the Pac-10 quarterfinals. Instead, the played the next night and lost Luc Mbah a Moute to an ankle sprain … and played today and saw Kevin Love wrench his back.

UCLA would have been better served losing on Thursday, taking two days off — and going into the tournament with two healthy big men, probably still as a No. 1 seed.

This needs to be fixed. No sport should allow a situation where losing is the smart way to go.

In the NBA, give all non-playoffs teams the same chance of getting the No. 1 pick. All 14 teams’ names into a hat, pull ’em out, 1 through 14.

In the colleges, eliminate conference tournaments … or designate the games as immaterial (exhibitions, essentially) to your “power ranking” for anyone except the winner.

After seeing his two starting big men get hurt in games his team didn’t need to play, who could blame Ben Howland if, a year from now, faced with a similar situation, he didn’t play his backups the whole way in the quarterfinals.