The NBA cleared Doug Christie of tanking accusations levied at the Sacramento Kings coach after he instructed his team to intentionally foul Seth Curry in the fourth quarter of the Kings’ loss to the Golden State Warriors on Tuesday night.
The coaching decision — in which Christie directed Kings guard Doug McDermott to foul Curry with 3:15 left and put the Warriors guard on the line for two free throws as a result — sparked a social media firestorm in which the Kings were accused, by fans and media members alike, of blatantly tanking. The Warriors’ Draymond Green escalated the situation after the Warriors’ 110-105 win when he criticized Christie’s move and claimed it was further proof of the NBA’s tanking dilemma. The league, in turn, launched an investigation into the matter.
However, Christie and Kings officials have insisted since the accusations emerged that this was nothing more than a good, old-fashioned coaching blunder. As one Kings official put it, “If we wanted to tank, we’re doing an awful job of it.”
Christie, who had three timeouts remaining and would have lost one of them when the game clock dipped below the three-minute mark, ordered the foul with the intention of preserving the timeout and then being able to draw up a play for the next possession. However, the Kings were already in the bonus — a fact Christie was unaware of — meaning Curry was awarded free throws rather than a side-out inbounds.
“The investigation found that Christie made no intentional effort to give the Warriors a shooting foul, or to cause the Kings to lose the game,” the NBA said in a statement.
Despite the one-sided nature of the online discourse, the evidence strongly favors the Kings. For starters, they have looked nothing like a tanking team for quite some time. Since Feb. 21, when they were 12-46 and had a three-game “lead” on Indiana for the league’s worst record, Sacramento has gone 9-13 while “falling” into a fourth-place tie with Utah in that department. What’s more, Christie has been adamant publicly that he refuses to support a tanking effort.
“Tanking is the last thing (I’d do),” Christie said after a win over Utah on March 15. “I respect the game too much. These young men, in my opinion, when you do things like that, it hurts them.”
A closer look at the facts in the Warriors game appears to support that stance. After trailing by 13 points with 1:38 remaining in the third quarter, the Kings went on a 17-2 run and took the lead with 9:40 left in the game. The Warriors had sent Steph Curry and Green to the bench after the third quarter, with the game seemingly in hand, but had to reinsert them at the 5:53 mark because the Kings had taken the lead (97-95 at that point).
As it relates to Christie’s ill-fated decision to order the foul on Seth Curry at the 3:15 mark, it’s worth noting that the goal which inspired it — utilizing the third timeout so that he could draw up a set play — actually worked. A play that was designed for McDermott, fittingly, led to a corner 3-pointer and a three-point Kings lead with 2:53 left.
This situation, silly as it might seem, is the latest reminder that the NBA is struggling mightily to take on the tanking problem. There have been some attempts at controlling it in recent months, with the Utah Jazz and Indiana Pacers both fined ($500,000 and $100,000, respectively) in mid-February for violating the league’s player participation policy. Still, as Green highlighted in his postgame commentary, there is no shortage of examples of blatant tanking elsewhere that have been overlooked by the league.
As the NBA Commissioner has made abundantly clear, most recently at the league’s Board of Governors meetings in late March, there is significant change coming to the league’s lottery system for next season and beyond. Those anti-tanking measures will be implemented in the hope that competitive integrity will be restored.
For now, though, the issue remains. As The Athletic’s John Hollinger wrote recently, when he explored the vast divide between the many tanking teams and the NBA’s elite, there have been a historic number of blowouts this season as a result of this practice. The Kings, by all appearances, are not guilty of being among that group.