After the Utah Jazz and Indiana Pacers were both fined six figures for “overt” tanking, NBA commissioner Adam Silver told reporters two days later during All-Star Weekend in Inglewood, California, that the league’s observed tanking behavior this season that’s worse than it’s seen in recent memory.
That’s what led to those hefty fines, Silver said at the podium on Saturday.
Advertisement
Silver was later asked if more severe punishments, such as those that would take away draft picks, could be levied in response to purposeful losing.
“There is talk about every possible remedy now to stop this behavior,” Silver emphasized.
For now, he believes the fines will send a message. Exposed for their nefarious roster management in recent games, the Jazz were slapped with a $500,000 fine, and the Pacers had to pay up $100,000.
“We’re going to be looking more closely at the totality of all the circumstances this season in terms of teams’ behavior and very intentionally wanted teams to be on notice,” Silver said.
Silver, who was clear that he won’t tolerate teams prioritizing draft position over winning in his statement on Thursday, explained Saturday that he feels the problem is rooted in the structure of the draft.
Advertisement
“The incentives are not necessarily matched here,” he said. “I think that the tradition in sports, where the worst-performing team receives the first pick from their partners — when any economist comes and looks at our system, they always point out you have the incentives backwards there.”
Silver, who took over for the late David Stern in 2014, was especially candid about his league’s lottery, which has been reworked over the years but, in its current form, determines the order of selection for the first four picks in the draft, whereas the remaining nine spots in the top 14 are filled out by the other lottery-eligible teams in reverse order of their regular-season records.
Each team that missed the playoffs from the previous season is eligible for the lottery and assigned odds. Teams that finished with worse regular-season records have higher odds to land the No. 1 pick than their more successful counterparts, however, the teams with the three-worst records all have the same chance to collect that coveted selection. There’s no guarantee that a bad record will earn a high pick, as evidenced by last season when the Jazz clocked out with a league-worst 17 wins but ended up with the fifth pick. Conversely, the Dallas Mavericks, who took part in the play-in tournament, won the Cooper Flagg sweepstakes despite just 1.8% odds to do so.
There’s a randomness that comes with the ping-pong-ball selection process, and it often begs the question if the draft is even setting the league up for the parity it desires.
Advertisement
“It’s something that we’ve been spending a lot of time on with our competition committee, outside consultants, advanced analytics,” he said.
“The issue is, if teams are manipulating their performance in order to get higher draft picks, even in a lottery, then the question becomes, ‘Even if teams were rewarded for draft picks purely according to the predicted odds of the lottery, are they really the worst-performing teams?’
“And my sense is, talking to GMs and coaches around the league, there’s probably even more parity than reflected in our records. And that goes to the incentive issue. It’s not clear to me, for example, that the 30th-performing team is that much measurably worse than the 22nd-performing team, particularly if you have incentive to perform poorly to get a better draft pick. So it’s a bit of a conundrum.”
This story is being updated.