There were some big games to be played yesterday in the NBA, with the Atlanta Hawks to play the Detroit Pistons in a matchup pitting a Hawks team who are rolling against a Pistons team trying to lock up the Eastern Conference’s No. 1 seed.
The Oklahoma City Thunder were to play the Boston Celtics, a showdown featuring the two most recent champions, while the Houston Rockets faced the Minnesota Timberwolves, a game that could factor mightily into Western Conference seeding.
Elsewhere, the Washington Wizards were to play the Utah Jazz, with the Wizards on a 16-game slide visiting against a team who would benefit from finishing fifth or worse in the league this season.
Photo: AP
The tanking epidemic — the practice of trying to lose to manipulate draft odds and have a chance at the best player possible — is being discussed yet again this week at the NBA board of governors meeting in New York. The NBA has tweaked the draft process a few times and it seems like bigger changes are on the way.
They probably would not be finalized this week, but they are coming.
“Are we seeing behavior that is worse this year than we’ve seen in recent memory? Yes, is my view,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said last month, adding that the league is “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.”
Photo: David Dermer / Imagn Images
Silver is expected to announce expansion plans, with the league’s governors set to vote this week on moving one step closer to adding franchises in Las Vegas and Seattle, but once the hubbub of expansion talk dies down, tanking talk will come up.
There have been three 16-game losing streaks in the NBA this season. Washington is on one now, the Indiana Pacers — a team who made the NBA Finals last season, but knew this would be a reset year the second that Tyrese Haliburton tore his Achilles in Game 7 of that series — snapped such a streak with a last-second win against the Orlando Magic on Monday night, while the Sacramento Kings went 0-16 during a stretch in January and last month.
In Tuesday’s games, the Cleveland Cavaliers beat the Magic 136-131, while the Charlotte Hornets blasted the Kings 134-90.
Photo: Mark J. Rebilas / Imagn Images
“We’ve got to get some wins, man. We’ve got to keep building as a team,” Indiana forward Pascal Siakam said in the televised on-court interview after the win in Orlando, Florida. “It’s been tough. It’s been a tough year for us, man. It shows your character. It tests you, but that’s life.”
Tanking has been a topic all season.
Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai said in the fall that the Nets — who had five first-round picks in last year’s draft — are rebuilding, adding that the team have only one first-round selection this year.
“We hope to get a good pick,” Tsai said at the All-In Summit. “So, you can predict what kind of strategy we will use for this season.”
The Nets were 17-55, the third-worst record in the league ahead of yesterday’s games. In the current lottery format, that would assure Brooklyn a 14 percent chance — the best odds possible — of winning the No. 1 pick.
Utah last month were fined US$500,000 for not using their best players in the fourth quarter of games, one of which the Jazz actually won against the Miami Heat. The Wizards’ current 16-game losing streak is the fourth such streak by Washington in just over two years, a run of absolute futility matched only once before in NBA history.
A bottom-five finish in the league standings would give Utah a 99.4 percent chance of winning a top-eight pick in the draft; otherwise, the pick would convey to Oklahoma City.
Jazz owner Ryan Smith, after the US$500,000 fine got levied, wrote on social media: “Agree to disagree... Also, we won the game in Miami and got fined? That makes sense.”
Agree to disagree might as well be the motto for tanking.
Some teams are out of the playoffs race and are thinking about their future, which is understandable.
The Milwaukee Bucks are mathematically alive, but need a series of miracles to reach the play-in tournament, while their best player, Giannis Antetokounmpo, has battled injuries all season. It would make sense that the Bucks do not want to risk him getting hurt again. It also makes sense that Antetokounmpo wants to keep playing.
The National Basketball Players’ Association on Tuesday said that it wants to work with the league on “meaningful new proposals that will directly address and discourage tanking.”
In Tuesday’s two other games, the New York Knicks beat the New Orleans Pelicans 121-116, with Jalen Brunson scoring 32 points, Karl-Anthony Towns producing a double-double and New York winning their seventh consecutive game, while the Denver Nuggets downed the Phoenix Suns 125-123.
Additional reporting by staff writer
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