If the nets are tanking, nobody told the staff. They’re just a bad team.

felt bad for Cam he seems like a legit nice dude… wish he had made that 3

It’s obvious to anyone who follows any sport that doesn’t have drafts and has things like promotion and relegation.

It spits right in the face of sporting integrity that a team can gain advantages by losing intentionally, but that’s because the franchise model in American sports treats the sport like an entertainment product first and a competition to find the best athletes second, instead of the other way around which it should be.

You would take that money too. Having an opinion about your works management style isn’t crazy. 

I mean money aside, wasn’t it reported that his family is really happy in Utah? He also might love playing for Will Hardy and likes the kind of team he’s molding, even if it’s still in an unfinished state. Those kinds of decisions are very, very rarely black & white single factor choices.

“Where I can’t be traded this season”

Lauri basically doing the D’Lo “love playing basketball freely” thing but this sub will only shit on one of them

Mutually exclusive concepts

I hate the contract from a basketball standpoint. Our best athlete in a major sport is locked up in a tanking team for 5 years. The only meaningful basketball he will play is in Euros and WC for Finland surrounded by inferior talent

But as a human it makes sense to stay in one place for your kids to grow up and get millions of money

If you’re offered a bajillion dollars you take it Lauri is obviously a good player but idk if he was worth that much on the free agent market. it’s still ok to think losing all the time sucks.

Thinking the same thing!

There’s nothing wrong with taking a lot of money to do something and still not like the management. Just because the economics of a sport dictate something everyone in their right mind is RIGHTFULLY doing doesn’t mean they should just shut up and never have an opinion – and being against tanking is absolutely the right opinion to have for any competitive player.

And he could have signed for the same amount of money but on August 6 instead of August 7, and be trade eligible before the deadline this season, allowing him to be traded to a more competitive team. He very purposely chose not to do so.

There’s something called the “Gold plan” which seems okay in theory. When teams get eliminated from playoff contention, they start earning draft points with wins. Highest draft points have highest picks. Bad teams still get rewarded because they get eliminated earlier so they have more chances to get points. But it keeps them competitive through the end of the season.

Instead of tank bowls, you’d have intense competitive games between bad teams at the end of the season trying to get draft points.

They could go the MLB route, which is you can’t be in the lottery 3 consecutive years. It basically forced teams on the fringe (the Royals) to go all in because they couldn’t be in the draft lottery. This resulted in them spending in the offseason, making moves, and they snuck in as a Wild Card Team.

For the NBA, something like “Your Pick can’t be Top 5” 3 years in a row… IDK how it would work, because it obviously gets harder due to the amount of 1st round picks that get traded between teams. But they could probably figure out a similar system that discouraged tanking because it wouldn’t benefit you in the long run.

MLB even has clauses/measures in place that prevent the large market teams from tanking. Once you get above a certain “Market Score”, you can’t draft in the lottery in consecutive years. This further discourages teams in major cities from tanking… unless you’re the White Sox of course

This is right but needs to be balanced a bit more. Today, teams are pretending to be especially bad to take advantage of the draft.

Imagine having to take Sarr and then missing out on this upcoming draft. Like nothing against Sarr, but he is not at the same level as a prospect as mutiple guys in this upcoming draft are. Washington didn’t even necessarily miss on that pick, but they would get screwed just by it being a weaker draft.

I agree. The entire reason the system exists as it does is to avoid turning smaller/less desirable markets into poverty franchises because of lack of ability to attract free agents or lack of money. It’s an equalizer and promotes parity. Yes teams abuse the system by tanking, but it’s just part of how the game is played, the league would be worse off without it.

Except with flat odds already - you get the Pistons situation of not ending up with the #1 pick despite being so so very bad for so long.

No system is perfect. So it’s not like the wheel wouldn’t result in something bad.

Maybe a hybrid where round 1 is the wheel and round 2 is purely based on record? So the worst team basically gets a late first rounder for sucking plus their own wheel pick?

All I know is flat odds isn’t awesome either.

I’m not sure if this is already in place but I think if you have consecutive years in the lottery your % of getting a top pick should continue to diminish so you aren’t always getting a top pick just because you’re incompetent. After let’s say 5 years (or some other arbitrary year idk) it resets.

So there is no fix, gotcha.

Absolutely TERRIBLE idea that turns the bottom half of the league into farm teams for the eternal contenders.

There’s another fix that also would never happen:

Get rid of the draft, remove the individual player max salary and institute a hard cap with 0 exceptions. Make players salaries actual % of the cap instead of fixed dollar amounts so as the cap rises and falls you don’t suddenly create gaps like what happened with the Warriors and Durant to suddenly inject crazy talent into an already stacked team.

While yes in theory mega markets will have an initial advantage if you institute a system like that, eventually they’ll run out of salary space to sign more players as more and more talent comes into the league. Basically think of it as a fantasy auction draft made real, with even more controls built in (thanks to the strict hard cap and contract lengths instead of things resetting every year).

It will never in a million years happen though because it makes it almost impossible to do trades, the draft brings in ratings and most importantly the middle class NBA player gets squeezed out of a chunk of the pie because without a max salary a lot of the money will be funneled towards the superstar players.

MLB makes it so you can’t draft in the lottery in 3 consecutive years. If you’re a major market (New York, Chicago, LA, etc), you can’t draft in 2 consecutive lottery rounds (defined as picks 1-5).

NBA could easily do the same.

Promotion and relegation is trading one problem for another. While it’s true that nobody tanks in leagues with that structure, soccer also has a parity problem that’s 100x greater than basketball exactly because there’s no draft. The best players go to the richest teams in the best locations and the same teams always win. Promotion and relegation would essentially guarantee that the Jazz or Hornets never win a championship.

My personal hot take is all bottom 10 (or 8, whatever the exact number isn’t important) teams should have even draft lottery odds and NBA should have relegation. The purpose of the game is to win. Anything not supporting that is against the purpose of this silly sport we all love.

I mean you could just get rid of the draft, that’s why teams tank. If you aren’t going to address the why, might as well not do anything at all.

Yep. It solves so much.

It would’ve had to have been there from the start. It could never happen now.

You could also just not reward the worst teams with the first pick of the draft.

Super unpopular opinion - I don’t think that the worst team deserves the best young player every year.

That’s stupid. Have a billion dollar franchise play against a bunch of nobodies.

NBA players would demand to be traded off that team instantly. Then the promoted teams would be the worse team in the league. Rinse repeat

You got me so excited over something that will never happen. Can you imagine the hype from a Wizards Hornets game on the last day of the season, loser gets relegated.

But you’re right, the whole gleague, the draft and all the contracts would have to be completely redesigned and it’s not feasible.

I’d sign up for this tomorrow. I used to live in Spain, and they have promotion and relegation literally all the way down to amateur rec league level. Basketball, soccer, handball, chess, you name it- they use it for everything.  On the Spanish news, they cover relegation races almost as closely as championship races. The competitive aspect of the games is through the roof- imagine having basically two playoff races every year. 

I also admit that I value parity a lot less than many other fans. When my teams are eliminated, I usually root for the top teams instead of underdogs. 

such a vastly superior system. you guys have no idea, sometimes relegation and/or promotion battles are even more hype than championship games.

underdog stories on a full team/fanbase/community basis, not just individuals. some small town team has a good run for a few years and they can make it to the big leagues, its great to see.

Would you risk giving up a guaranteed 220 million dollars? The jazz could offer him more money than any other team because they upped the final year of his old contract when he signed an extension.

Logical fallacy

Guess how many of them read the article. I guess zero percent.

Also how is caring about winning a bad thing lol

how is losing by accident a more enjoyable product than losing intentionally? the giants weren’t tanking this year and you still couldn’t pay me to watch them.

I like it!

Another idea: Every last team should be forced to hang a banner of shame in their gym for being losers.

The Jazz don’t have a decent team at all. Other than Lauri and Walker Kessler, who do they have? The corpse of John Collins? Jordan Clarkson in 2025? They probably have the least amount of NBA talent on their roster this year outside of the Wizards.

Are you really saying the Jazz are the first to tank before the ASB? Because I’m pretty sure there have been at least one if not multiple teams tanking all season long every year for the last few years. “The Process” in Philadelphia, Troy Weaver’s Pistons, etc.

Its time to reduce expansion. There are too many teams. The talent is too thin, and too many teams don’t have a chance and know it.

Well the Jazz weren’t he first to do it. The Sixers did this during the Process era.

relegation and promotion is directly incompatible with our current draft and salary cap system. our system is set up so all teams are on a roughly equal playing field and any team can get good someday and win. in England there are 20 premier league teams but only four or five that win the title 95 percent of the time. That Sucks!

I think the draft process should be changed. Make it more random and less based on record, with a few rules in place to make it not totally broken.

ie, worst teams get slightly better odds but not amazingly better odds.

playoff teams don’t get top 10 picks

teams cant draft in the top 10 more than two or three years in a row

small rules like that, and then the rest is just a dice roll.

I don’t think any fan enjoys celebrating losses either.

This is wrong. Lots of fans prefer their team lose.

as an american, the fact that the same four teams win your leagues every year is a turn off. i think the draft system needs some tweaks but at least any team has the potential to become a champion no matter how rich the owners are or how big their market is. i’m good on every superstar signing with the clippers because ballmer is the richest.

This is the way technically

Typical yank attitude, never can hope for anything to be better if you’re paid money.

The pit of hell some teams would be stuck in.. and the wizards think they have it bad now