In addition to proposing three different versions of lottery reform at its board of governors meetings this week, the NBA proposed implementing harsher penalties — including taking away a team’s first-round pick — for tanking, according to The Athletic’s Joe Vardon.
Historically, when the NBA has issued punishments for tanking — or, more often, issued punishments for talking about tanking — they have been in the form of fines, dating back to then-commissioner Larry O’Brien fining then-Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling $10,000 for comments he made at a luncheon in 1982. Most recently, it fined the Utah Jazz $500,000 for “conduct detrimental to the league” and fined the Indiana Pacers $100,000 for violating the Player Participation Policy in February.
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Next season, teams that hold out or limit players’ minutes in the interest of losing games and improving their lottery odds could face much more severe consequences. Under the NBA’s reported proposal, commissioner Adam Silver would be able to take away a team’s first-round pick or move it to the end of the lottery or the end of the first round. He’d also be able to fine teams millions of dollars.
“Without stricter penalties, you could still have crazy behavior,” a league source told The Athletic. “You have to have something in place that is so drastic, a team would actually think twice about tanking. And if a team tries it and gets caught, then the other teams need to see the penalties and realize it isn’t worth it to try.”
At a press conference on Wednesday, Silver said that the league takes the issue of tanking “very seriously” and pledged to change the incentive structure around the draft lottery. “We are going to fix it, full stop,” Silver said. “I want to say that directly to our fans.” He also acknowledged the difficulty of distinguishing between a “tank” and a “rebuild with integrity.”
The overt manipulation of lineups by Utah and Indiana “required a response from the league office,” Silver said. “But there’s such a subtlety to this, when incentives don’t match. We’re now into it with coaches’ decisions on lineups and when players come in and out of the game. Injuries, doctors going back and forth with each other. Pain levels of players.”
I took this to mean that Silver would prefer not to police rotation decisions. That had been the league’s stance until it issued those fines to the Pacers and Jazz, and it’s what Silver said at a press conference at All-Star weekend.
“We spend a lot of time at the league office going back and forth with teams on injury reports, on coaches’ decisions,” he said then. “It’s not a position necessarily we want to be in.”
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One of the arguments in favor of lottery reform is that, if changing the incentives structure works, the league won’t have to get involved with this kind of stuff anymore. A you-know-it-when-you-see-it standard for tanking violations is not ideal, and teams that are out of contention have valid, non-tanking-related reasons — player development, injury prevention, etc. — to play young players over veterans. It is notable, then, that the league is suggesting it should have more power to discipline teams for how they manage their rotations, not less.
Broadly speaking, the question is what role the league should be playing here. More specifically, there is a massive difference between forcing a team to forfeit a first-round pick and moving it to the end of the lottery or the end of the first round. And, for NBA teams worth billions of dollars, there is a gargantuan difference between any of those proposed punishments and a several-million-dollar fine.
We’ll find out what the owners collectively think is appropriate when the board of governors votes on anti-tanking measures at a special meeting in May.