What is to be done about NBA tanking? Based on the pissy administrative response from the league to some recently and spectacularly egregious examples of Tank Mode, you might think it is the most pressing problem facing a league that has a few of those. Thankfully, the solution is easy: Book a fight in the schoolyard, where the people doing the fighting aren't the students but the teachers. Sign us up for that one every day.
Commissioner Adam Silver took the bait on Thursday when he decided to fine the Utah Jazz $500,000 and the Indiana Pacers $100,000 for failing to meet even the subterranean standards for competitive dignity during the past week. The Jazz have been particularly noteworthy—which is a first for them on any front over the past decade or so—and so received five times the tsk-tsk-tsk that the Pacers did. And while every owner regards half a million scoots the way you do a twice-used Kleenex, and while most of your more ambitious lousy teams would gladly pay $500,000 per game the rest of the way if it got them the top pick in the draft, Jazz owner Ryan Smith clearly didn't like the spotlight that came with being fined the equivalent of Brice Sensabaugh's left leg.
So he did what any wounded rich guy would do—he went on antisocial media and used the delightful fifth-grade logic of "Yeah, but we don't do it all the time." Smith might have made a better case had he pointed out that the Jazz were not the first team to think of sitting out the healthy starters that had played the first three quarters of the game, but a billionaire scorned is a billionaire scorned. You have to grade these things on a curve.
That would have been sweet and dandy on its own—a keister-hurt owner is never bad entertainment and always at least a mild joy to behold—but having built up this head of steam, Smith then clapped back at ESPN's contracts/salary cap/make me confess to murders by talking about the second apron specialist Bobby Marks. You don't need me to tell you whether it is "a good sign" or not when your team's owner picks a fight with someone whose job is going on podcasts, but Smith didn't let that hold him back from this petulant little gem, in response to Marks comparing the fine to having to pay the luxury tax in the previous CBA, itself a risibly arcane reference:
"Hey Bobby… maybe sit this one out. You have no clue what paying this is like and your amnesia this week is comical."
Well, "Bobby" can do the math, and the fine levied against the Jazz amounted to roughly three-tenths of one percent of the salaries of the Jazz's active roster, including the chunk of Jaren Jackson Jr.'s, salary. That last bit is relevant because the Jazz traded for him two weeks ago despite Jackson having a knee issue that turns out to be (say this five times and apologize to your brain afterward) a pigmented villonodular synovitis growth that will probably cause him to miss the rest of the season. Easy come, easy go, except when the money is going back to the home office, we guess.
But if we can speak for Ry-Guy here, it isn't the money that irks him nearly as much as the embarrassment of the NBA's release announcing the fines, which included the condemnatory phrase "conduct detrimental to the league." It seems everyone who has ever watched a basketball game, and noticed that one-third of the league is trying to lose their nightly full-price exhibition in exchange for an infinitesimally larger chance at getting to draft A.J. Dybantsa, finally got under Silver's neckline. And so, two days before donning his annual Kick Me sign and heading out to make his state of the league address at the All-Star Game, he decided to get snippy about integrity. Or, to be more precise, the illusion of integrity.
It's not hard to understand that decision. In Smith's unstated but very real point of view, he and his team are trying to become competitive again under the one avenue he believes is open to him, which is the draft lottery. For one, he'd pay half a mil for every game from here until the end of the season to get the top pick. That's $13 million, seat cushion cash to Smith. He knows that players for the most part opt for Salt Lake City as a destination right after they choose Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland (it's pronounced "Springfield"), and having to overpay for every appealing player is no way to go through life. This is the system Smith was handed when he bought the team from former owner Gail Miller five years ago, and to his way of thinking all those willfully fumbled fourth quarters were the team working the system as it exists to get the greatest advantage they could.
That system hasn't been kind to him, as the Jazz have missed the playoffs the last three years and are working diligently to miss this one as well (and nicely done on that front). Now he gets a scolding from Ichabod Crane Jr. for working that system out where everyone can see it? No wonder he sarcastically posted "Also, we won the game in Miami and got fined? That makes sense ..." Which is true, although why he didn't mention his team's subsequent win over Sacramento is a bit of a puzzler. Maybe it's just that the Kings have put together a 14-game losing streak that has taken them to the bottom of the league and out of Utah's purposely enfeebled reach, and haven't been dinged a dime. It's embarrassing when teams try to lose, but others just do it naturally.
But we digress. By becoming the new poster kids for losing on purpose in what is a disturbingly crowded field, the Jazz embarrassed Silver, and so he has embarrassed them in turn within his limited power to sass back at his bosses. More to the point, Silver is siccing the league's competition committee (two owners, four general managers, three coaches and a union representative) to get to work on methods to eradicate tanking—or, anyway, methods short of the one thing that would actually fix it, which is eliminating or actively reforming the draft itself. One trial balloon from that group was to have a lottery team tournament after the season ends, which feels particularly daft in that it asks players to play for the right to lose their jobs while also lengthening a schedule everyone already thinks is 12 games too long. It's also difficult to imagine a television product less likely to draw an audience than an anti-playoffs with the worst teams in the sport in it. Otherwise it's a great idea, right up there with relegation by design.
In other words, fines it is. And so Utah will pay the price for being artless in its pursuit of that slim extra chance at a one-spot advancement in the draft order. But if Smith's recent rash of delightful petulance is any gauge, the price the Jazz pay is to the nation's benefit. Sure, this is mostly a process story, but it's one that exists because of years of semi-sanctioned shithousery, a non-competitive gambit that has only become less and less surreptitious with time. We're not that far from a team measuring the cost of chartering a cross-country flight and booking hotel rooms against the cost of the fine and going, "Wait, we actually lose less money by forfeiting? Call the airport."
So now we can turn our attention to Silver's Saturday address. If we have been living correctly, Smith will be in the audience firing double eagles at the commissioner from the front row. If we're going to do this thing, let's do it right. Let's do it loud and let's have wealth-on-wealth blood feuds. Knicks owner Jimmy Dolan might be a tedious heap of oily rags, but he and his compatriots in the ownership community's peevish vanguard are fighting the fight we want fought—billionaires on the attack against their own class. If he can get Ryan Smith on his side, we'll have a full-on movement. The sham of trafficking at the bottom of the standings is the weapon we have chosen, and if it's a blunt one, it should still do fine. USA vs. The World may work for ghouls like Kristi Noem, but this is the culture war the rest of us truly need.
