The NBA issued two fines in its ongoing efforts to curb tanking on Thursday — one standard, and one that requires much closer examination.
Less notably, the league fined the Indiana Pacers (15-40) $100,000 for violating its player participation policy on Feb. 3 by sitting Pascal Siakam. There are layers to it, and if you’d like to engage with some dry legalese, here it is.
We had seen that before. However, the NBA’s fine of the Jazz was new, or at least newish. Utah decided to sit former All-Stars Lauri Markkanen and Jaren Jackson Jr., the latter of whom the Jazz acquired before last Thursday’s trade deadline, in the fourth quarter of close games in Florida — a loss to the Magic and a win over the Heat. The NBA declared itself sufficiently offput, and fined the Jazz $500,000.
This behavior embarrassed the NBA, the league seemed to say. Frankly, the NBA should be embarrassed that it got to this point, and embarrassed that it had to warn and eventually punish its teams. This is on the league, not its franchises. And what the league does next will tell us a lot about how seriously it thinks the problem is. If it opts for half-measures, teams will continue to look for ways to make losing work for them.
“Overt behavior like this that prioritizes draft position over winning undermines the foundation of NBA competition and we will respond accordingly to any further actions that compromise the integrity of our games,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement. “Additionally, we are working with our competition committee and board of governors to implement further measures to root out this type of conduct.”
Rich stuff. Good teams have concluded that regular-season results are so divorced from playoff success that they often rest their best players, prioritizing health in the spring over winning in the winter. Bad teams believe regular-season results are so crucial to eventually acquiring the talent necessary to be good that they, too, look to rest players during the year — so long as those results involve lots of losing, increasing their draft lottery odds.
And the NBA has the gall to imply the problem is the teams’ strategies, not its own reward system?
The league has been promising to take action against tanking all season long, leaking out potential parts of a solution that will be considered: limiting how teams can protect draft picks in trades, locking lottery odds earlier in the season or limiting how often teams can pick near the top of the draft. The NBA has already flattened its draft lottery odds, with the worst team in the league dropping from a 25 percent chance at the top pick to 14 percent in 2019, with tweaks down the line. Reporters will surely ask Silver about the issue this weekend at All-Star events in Los Angeles.
The flattening didn’t get rid of tanking — in this case, defined as bad teams not pushing to win as much as they otherwise could — and neither will those other measures. They could help limit the practice, sure, but until the league stops incentivizing losing by giving better draft odds to worse teams, there will be some that see more benefit in losing than winning.
The Jazz have been at the center of this for a while now. In both 2022-23 and 2023-24, Utah traded away some of its better players and rested Markkanen, among others, to fall down the standings as the season progressed, going from Play-In Tournament contenders to lottery hopefuls. Last year, they were so bad from the start that few shenanigans were necessary. The franchise signalled it would not do that this year, moving toward prioritizing winning. The trade for Jackson proved there was some truth in that sentiment. (Jackson will have knee surgery and likely miss the rest of the season, although nobody around the league has publicly suggested this is related to tanking. Jackson has a localized benign growth in his left knee.)
But what the Jazz, who will lose their draft pick to the Oklahoma City Thunder if it does not fall in the top eight, did in Florida was apparently a step too far for the NBA. Except the Toronto Raptors did the same thing last year, and they didn’t even have a pick that might vanish. The league did not punish them. The Raptors and Jazz aren’t the only teams that have done it. It is just an uglier look for the league than when teams invent injuries for their players, or indicate injuries are worse than they are, keeping them out of games entirely. As ever, the optics are the bigger issue than the behavior itself.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver can’t put the tanking genie back in the bottle through fines alone. (Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu via Getty Images)
At least the Pacers violated a rule. The Jazz have a case to be genuinely upset at the penalty, and the social media behaviour of Utah majority stakeholder Ryan Smith suggests they are. There is no rule against doing what the Jazz did. Surely, the league has been internally warning teams against doing this sort of thing, and making their intentions regarding rule changes to curb the behavior is an easy way to emphasize that externally. But in a year in which more teams are likely to make March Basketball worse than ever, the Jazz feel like a convenient scapegoat.
Speaking of those rule changes, the league has a chance to prove it really cares about the regular season. If the NBA truly wanted to display that, it would shorten the season, prioritizing player health and making each game matter more. Not only would that cut down on the time a team could devote to losing, but it would also encourage the best teams to play their stars more often, as it would be tougher to create a huge gap in the standings.
Forget about that — the league and the National Basketball Players Association aren’t about to sacrifice the basketball-related income that comes with more games, even if an economic case could be made that each game would hold more value if there were fewer of them. No matter how long the season is, the NBA could simply decide that losing will no longer be rewarded.
It could abolish the draft. It could make all non-playoff teams have the same lottery odds, and then draw for all 14 spots instead of just the top four, as it does now. (It then ranks 5-30 by the reverse standings). It could draw for 22 spots, including teams that lose in the first round, too.
Of course, that would create issues with the league stakeholders who prize parity, or at least the idea of it, above all else. How will bad teams find hope if there isn’t a direct link between losing and landing a star in the sport in which one great player can drive more success than in any other?
Let’s not pretend Silver’s job is easy here. He has to build consensus among a bunch of rich, powerful people who are used to getting their way. While they are all governors in the league, they will rarely be perfectly aligned.
However, getting rid of tanking is easy, at least if the league wants it to be. All Silver has to do is stop making losing advantageous in the least. If Silver needs a business case to present, here’s one: If the league keeps pushing half-measures that indicate winning regular-season games isn’t all that important, fans are going to agree. What happens to the basketball-related income then?