The NBA’s general managers, assembled in homes, hotels or team headquarters across North America, shifted in their chairs, the discomfort cutting through Thursday’s video call.
Evan Wasch, an executive vice president with the NBA, had been laying out the league’s ideas for anti-tanking measures that could be implemented next season when the timing of those potential changes was challenged. Sean Marks, who has been general manager of the Brooklyn Nets for 10 years and whose team is in Year 2 of one of those strategic rebuilds, incorrectly assumed that the changes could be immediate, which would read as unfair to executives midway through a previously accepted practice that has benefited other teams.
“Have you guys given any thought to that?” Marks asked Wasch, according to notes of the call provided to The Athletic by three executives on the call.
Wasch gently reminded Marks that the potential changes would be implemented next season so teams would have some time to change strategies, said those three executives on the call granted anonymity by The Athletic to share sensitive discussions.
Then Wasch asked NBA commissioner Adam Silver if he wanted to weigh in.
“I would just say, Sean,” Silver said, “you could assume for next season your only incentive will be to win games.”
The exchange with Silver toward Marks, and a few others between the NBA commissioner and the general managers being watched — and penalized — by the league for trying to lose to improve their draft status, especially with months left in the season, highlighted the tension between team executives trying to strategize rebuilds under the league’s current rules against a Silver administration concerned by the appearance that the integrity of the sport is being threatened by the practice.
There was a noticeable shift in Silver’s tone and demeanor on this particular issue, according to the three executives who spoke with The Athletic, with one of them saying, “He sounded more like Stern than Silver,” referencing Silver’s occasionally brazen predecessor David Stern, who was known for telling owners, general managers, players and reporters exactly what he thought, with choice words.
It was a marked departure in behavior from Silver, 63, a lawyer by trade who is in his 12th season as commissioner and usually speaks in a lawyerly, collegial tone in meetings.
At another point on the call, Silver said to a general manager that coaches on tanking teams “don’t want to do this,” essentially pitting these team execs against their most important employees (coaches can be fired, while players, essentially, cannot).
When the general manager responded, “no, our coach(es) are on board with our plan,” Silver told him that coaches “tell that to you. They say they’re on board because they have to. When we talk to coaches, no one wants to go in there and try to lose (on purpose).”
The sentiment was also expressed on the call that general managers must present long-term plans to their owners, and for bad teams those plans include tanking — so there is incentive for general managers to oversee lengthy rebuilds through tanking to get better draft picks for their own job security.
Silver told the executives on the call that the league had to change incentives “and mindsets,” so executives don’t have to implement tanking to save their jobs.
One GM of a team that had undergone a tank and came out the other side of it as one of the strongest teams in the league said the executives on the call needed to “support Adam on this.” Another said “we are all to blame,” citing both rules that needed to change and teams taking too much advantage of those rules.
“Let’s just say the message was sent,” one of the executives on the call said. “I am very happy Adam said what he said.”
Another executive on the call, from one of the league’s currently tanking teams, said, “There’s no doubt there is a heightened level of tension between front offices and the league.
“Overwhelmingly, everyone realizes changes are coming and they need to come,” the executive continued. “It’s a matter of when and what and how. What changes you implement, do they last a year, five years, is this a quick band-aid? That’s not what we want.”
Any changes would have to be approved by the league’s board of governors (team owners, or their representatives to the board), and the next meeting is in March, Wasch added. But Wasch also said part of the goal of this particular meeting was to get input from the general managers as to which rule changes would actually get them to stop tanking, or to commit to playing their best players, night in and night out, regardless of record.
Among the ideas proposed were limits on pick protections or no top-four picks in consecutive years, no top-four picks if you were a conference finalist the year before.
The Nets’ tank is more traditional in nature. They’re starting two 19-year-old rookies on an, overall, extremely young team that is now 15-38, with designs on being more competitive next season anyway, according to a team source.
The more egregious tanking situations — the examples Silver used last weekend to declare that tanking is worse in the NBA than it has ever been — are teams like the Washington Wizards, Indiana Pacers and Utah Jazz, who traded for All-Star caliber players and then stashed them on the injured list while their teams continue to lose, and also remove starter-caliber players early from games they could win.
The Jazz and Pacers have already been fined this month by the league office for obvious tanking, and there could be more penalties coming if the behavior continues. In a worst-case scenario, executives said, if starters are pulled from winnable games for no reason before the start of the fourth quarter, those teams could lose draft picks.
Otherwise, the league is fielding ideas from all 30 teams for how to set up a better system that does not incentivize losing. (Marks, one executive said, asked on the call to see all those ideas.) Numerous ideas and input were shared on the call by more than half of the general managers in the league. While Silver’s change in tone was noted, they also said the call was constructive and productive.
Silver’s delivered message was, when it comes to tanking, as summarized by an executive on the call: “This is not who we are going to be as a league.”
— The Athletic’s Mike Vorkunov contributed to this story.