Winning a Match vs. Winning Strategically

[DampRobot]

I would post this in You Make the Call, but it's less of a rules topic and more of a strategic/ethical topic.

Going into the last matches of SVR on Saturday, we were ranked 18th or so, and thought that we wouldn't be in a picking position come alliance selection. However, we thought we had a very good chance of being picked, as we had been approached by three separate teams about alliance selections.

We had won all our matches since losing our 2nd, 3rd and 4th (due to our shooter wheel untreading itself), and knew that if we played as well as we had been playing before, we stood a very good chance of beating 233 in our last match of the day, match 95. At that time, Pink was ranked second, but we knew that if we beat them as we were projected to, they would drop to 5th or 6th seed. However, if we didn't win, they would stay as 2nd seed.

If Pink was ranked 2nd in alliance selections, they would have been in a position to break up any potential alliances within the top few seeds, including any between 971 and 1662. Even if they didn't break up any alliances, as a fairly inconsistent team, they would have significantly weakened the 2nd alliance, and potentially opened up the finals for any even alliance that could shut down their partner. My team could have been on such an alliance, and had the potential to go to CMP in a wildcard slot (254-118 would have presumably still won, and opened up 2 slots for 2 finalist teams).

As coach, I was approached by another team's coach and begged to win the match. I was honest with him that I considered not playing to win. We later ended up beating Pink 80-58, to end the tournament 7-3-0 and Pink's 8-2-0. You can watch the match here.

What should we have done? Should we have played to win, or should we have allowed 233 to win the match in order to break up and weaken alliances in eliminations?