The NBA Needed a Win

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The NBA needed a win. And in the All-Star Game, they got one. Touche, Wemby. Which is great, because things were pretty dire there for a sec.

Right in the lead-up to that much-maligned annual showcase, and directly following the end of the NFL season — which did end in a blowout, not for nothing — basketball tends to have more sports fans’ sole attention.

The Utah Jazz quickly turned that into a negative by sitting their best two players — Lauri Markkanen and new arrival Jaren Jackson, Jr. — for the entirety of two consecutive 4th quarters, among the more blatant tanking moves I can remember. The Pacers then followed that performance with a slightly less egregious example of their own. Both teams have since been fined, $500k and $100k respectively.

For context, the Pacers have the 2nd-worst record in the league right now, and the Jazz have the 6th-worst. Both are pretty clearly gunning for a top pick in the upcoming draft, which happens to be loaded this year. The incentives of the league are such that these teams actively want to lose to get a better shot at a difference-making star.

(I will also point out, as a fly-by-night antitrust guy, that much of this routes back to the very existence of a draft system in which players don’t get to choose where they sign, but since that probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, I digress.)

The Kings are the proud owner of the worst record in the league, which they helped secure in quick succession yesterday as I received two ESPN updates in a row, 10 minutes apart. Behold!

Coincidence? Likely not. So yeah, this has gotten to be a real problem, which it has been for some time now. My own feelings have evolved on it. I definitely used to approach this from more of a game theory lens, believing — and still believing — that a team that knows its path to success is acquiring a superstar should do what’s in its power to acquire a superstar, and that can often be losing for draft position. It’s a question of incentive. We know what the present system rewards, so we can’t be surprised when teams pursue it.

The question, then, is what we’re willing to do with the system. Commissioner Adam Silver has signaled that’s a lot, which we’ll get to shortly.

I’d first like to respond to Mark Cuban’s point on this, which I think is insane, but is, I guess, one way to look at it? Note also that he follows the time-honored tradition of: the richer and more influential you are, the less time you will take to spellcheck. Never fails.

Why the NBA should embrace tanking -

The NBA has kate been misguided thinking that fans want to see their teams compete every night with a chance to win. It’s never been that way that way.

When I got into the nba, they thought they were in the basketball business. They aren’t. They are in the business of creating experiences for fans.

Few can remember the score from the last game they saw or went to. They can’t remember the dunks or shots. What they remember is who they were with. Their family, friends, a date. That’s what makes the experience special.

Fans know their team can’t win every game. They know only one team can win a ring. What fan that care about their team’s record want is hope. Hope they will get better and have a chance to compete for the playoffs and then maybe a ring.

The one way to get closer to that is via the draft. And trades. And cap room. You have a better chance of improving via all 3 , when you tank.

We didn’t tank often. Only a few times over 23 years, but when we did, our fans appreciated it. And it got us to where we could improve, trade up to get Luka and improve our team.

The nba should worry more about fan experience than tanking. It should worry more about pricing fans out of games than tanking.

You know who cares the least about tanking , a parent who cant afford to bring their 3 kids to a game and buy their kids a jersey of their fave player

Tanking isn’t the issue. Affordability and quality of game presentation are

Now, again, I think this is broadly insane and amounts to an emotionally manipulative appeal to this all being about the experience, man. It’s who you’re with. Which, if I may speak freely, is absolute nonsense.

I’ll agree in terms of one half of his point, that it’s important to the long-term health of the league that fans be able to afford to go to the games. That does strike me as obvious.

But you know what matters a lot to the '“quality of game presentation?” The best players playing in the fucking game! He conveniently fails to mention an increasingly common outcome for fans who do spend a lot of money to attend these games. They shell out however many hundreds of dollars it costs in their particular city to go and take their kids to the arena, and when they show up, they learn that the guy whose jersey their kids are all wearing isn’t suiting up. Not because he’s hurt, but because the team doesn’t want to win.

That’s a bad combo. You know the team’s trying to lose, which diminishes the already tenuous value of the regular season. Without going to an emotionally manipulative appeal myself, it does turn the game into a meaningless exercise. The integrity of the competition is genuinely important to holding fans’ interest. When you combine a probably pre-determined outcome with stars not participating, you’ve allowed that integrity to erode.

And again, I’ll agree that in the system as currently constructed, teams acting rationally who want to get better — and offer fans, as Cuban points out, a sense of hope — have every reason to tank in pursuit of better draft picks. Like I said, those are the incentives of the league.

What’s on the table now as a result of all this, though, is just changing those incentives. To do so would take a radical rethinking of how the NBA is structured, but by the sounds of it, Silver isn’t discounting something radical. There appears to be some political will behind that, though how much is left by the time the offseason rolls around is a different question.

Now, as I mentioned, the NBA needed a win and they got one. By the grace of Victor Wembanyama — leave it to a French alien — the All-Star Game is back. It was competitive. People gave a shit. I didn’t believe they could do that, so hey, kudos from me. I’d obviously rather it be worth watching, so thanks for proving me wrong there.

It’s just hard not to see the throughline. You can ding LeBron on all kinds of things over the years (including lazing through the All-Star Game, not that he’s been alone in that) but you have to give him this: he always plays. Part of that, of course, is the fact that LeBron is really good and generally ensures that the team is too good to bother tanking.

The other, which he’s explained when asked about it, is that he seems to believe it’s important to show up. I don’t remember when he said this, and it kind of doesn’t matter, but it’s always stuck with me. In the midst of some prior crisis of conscience around load management, he made the simple point that Cuban misses.

If a given fan were to go to one game a year, let’s say back in LeBron’s Cleveland days, and they show up with their kids and LeBron’s not playing, that immediately becomes a severely diminished experience. How are we to justify doing that across the league on a regular basis? It’s not like they’re getting a partial refund for their tickets, either. You pay full price, which, as Cuban points out, is a lot of money, and you have no guarantee whatsoever that you will see the entertainment product you paid to see. Imagine if we did this for concerts or movies. It’s not a thing in football, though it is a less prominent thing in baseball, where there’s some precedent: starters pitch once a week and recover for the rest, and position players take a couple days off somewhere in the midst of a grueling 162-game schedule.

Much of the NBA’s problem rests with the length of its schedule, which is widely acknowledged to be an immovable object. It’s almost definitely several steps further than even an incensed Silver is willing to go. By which I really mean the owners are willing to go.

Cuban’s former colleagues don’t want to part with the gate fees for the ~15-20 games that should probably go, no matter how beneficial that would be for the health of the league and its players. It’s too much money to give up, and the players’ union would have to accept those pay cuts too, which only adds to the unlikelihood of that ever coming to pass. I think it should, but Silver can’t just wave a wand.

Maybe we can’t have nice things. It is the provenance of the NBA fan to be perpetually concerned with what’s wrong, rather than what’s right, about the state of the league. And I take that to be a fair criticism, of which I am clearly a part. (See above.)

But I also think the current outcry is a little more substantial than whining for whining’s sake. And since we have permission to be dramatic — motion to call this the Cuban corollary — if it’s for the sake of anything, it’s for the sake of the league.

🏒 I must confess, I’m not a huge Winter Olympics guy. I have trouble getting into a lot of the more obscure skiing/luge/skeleton-type sports. The hockey, though. The hockey! Scintillating couple of wins for the USA this week, not that we’ve earned much in the way of nationalism lately. Still. Unbelievable goal from Megan Keller on the women’s side to win the gold over Canada, and an almost equally cool goal from Quinn Hughes on the men’s side to stave off an upset to Sweden.

⚾ Tony Clark, the head of the MLBPA, is stepping down in the wake of what sure sounds like an… intra-familial sex scandal? I’ve only seen this worded as “an inappropriate relationship with his sister-in-law,” which tells us that something deeply disturbing is going on here, but only so specifically. You may recall that the players’ union is currently in the middle of CBA talks with the league, and you may also recall that the players’ union has been under investigation for some time now. Safe to say this is bad to worse.

🏉 We got tickets to the Rugby World Cup! Will we end up attending with a young child in tow? Perhaps not. But we have given ourselves the option, so that’s our radical move this week. Join us, won’t you?

📚 I remain deep in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which I’m liking quite a bit. David Mitchell has a talent for time travel that I’ve always appreciated. I’ve also, owing to the above, been getting into Bringing up Bebe, which is frankly just a good book. Pamela Druckerman went to Colgate, and I know there’s an email chain somewhere with me asking her for advice on how to make it in journalism. There’s something funny to me about the fact that she would’ve just left the NYT for France right around that time, and to write one of the more prominent baby books going these days. Full-circle moment, as they say. Here’s to doing our nights.