There certainly shouldn’t be customized protections the way they currently have it. Lottery protected or not, that’s it. 

Yep.

Pick protections are why the Jazz (and Wizards and Pacers) are “shamelessly tanking”.

It is indisputably better for each of those teams to lose games and keep their pick. They are doing what is “right” for the long term future of their team.

What is ~15 years of AJ Dybantsa’s potential HOF talent worth? A hell of a lot more than 500k. Fine the Jazz 50m - it’s still worth it economically to tank for Dybantsa.

Pick protections are a huge part of the “tanking problem”. And no one can make the argument that Utah should win so OKC can profit. That’s worse for competitive balance, long term. OKC getting Dybantsa…makes them (maybe) the 1960s Celtics. Who wants that?!?

Next CBA has to ban pick protections. You either traded the pick or you didn’t. No more of this nonsense.

This is the only viable solution. All the other ideas end up just punishing teams for being bad which is exactly how a team is bad forever. The entire reason teams tank is to escape perpetual mediocrity.

Or severely limit it to like 1st overall or top 3 only 

That would have more of an effect on trading than it would tanking. Teams would just trade draft picks way less to avoid giving up a potential top 5 pick.

It seems dumb but protections are almost needed to help protect franchises and fan bases from dumb GMs and owners.

Yeah pretty sure they sat SGA for a good chunk of the season

At a certain point you realize these teams are all just out for it themselves. They don’t care about “double standards” just their organization being better than the next one.

Or remember when they sent Al Horford home for the year? lol

When the Jazz were owed a protected pick from the Warriors, they shamelessly tanked to get into the bottom 9 and kept the pick and nobody said a word. 2 years later they won a title.

I’m so fucking tired of the Jazz being shit on so fucking much for playing the same game everyone else did without near this level of public outcry.

Presti is a whiny bitch

This. Like go ahead and make an example of us (when we are 2-1 during these fourth quarter sits) but it’s freakin RICH coming from Presti who literally tanked so hard, got his players and is pulling up the ladder behind him

Also plenty of teams sitting like 4-5 players right now, at least we are PLAYING our guys some of the game to give them development, but I guess bc it’s so much more blatant we’re tanking the more “obvious and wrong way.”

Yeah but only argument for this is the jazz owe the thunder a potential pick you shouldn’t be allowed to do this during one of those years

The 500k fine isn’t to punish the Jazz, it’s to get people to shut up about it.

Honestly Boozer looks really good too.

You say this as if a billionaire wouldn’t push a child in front of a car for an extra buck lol

Ppl are going to hate this just because it’s the Thunder, but then go cry about Utah sitting their starters in the next thread

That don’t mean we have to like it.

Fans act in their own interest too, and as a fan I don’t like hypocrites!

only fair thing to do tbh

I know you mean to the Jazz, but Jerry Colangelo fucking up a potential dynasty in OKC would be hilarious.

Find a new slant

I OOTL here, as a Suns and DBacks fan I’m indebted to Jerry though, so what’s this referencing? His work with team USA?

Wouldn’t have made the playoffs with 2 wins and we knew it with the Thunders schedule in their last 2

That was some of the biggest bullshit I’ve ever seen.

In fairness we only tanked two games. Still an issue but it’s not exactly an apples to apples comparison

That isn’t true. They had almost no chance to make the play-in. They didn’t tank to get out of the play-in, they tanked to have worse record than some other team (I think Bulls, but I’m not 100%), so they would keep their pick.

Until they had realistic chance to make the play-in they didn’t tank. They only started tanking when making the play-in was almost impossible (they’d have to win both games and Thunder would have to lose against some tanking team in the last game).

Tanking isnt an issue, it’s throwing games. The right way to tank is to trade away vets and let young high upside dudes develop and learn through mistakes, not to bench all stars in the 4th because you might win. Also no team with more than one all star level guy should tank that’s just sad. What the jazz did was pretty crazy and for their coach to be straight up like “yeah I’m not playing my best players in the 4th” that’s definitely an aberration

As much as I hate to say it, it’s probably related to gambling. At least from the fans perspective. There’s probably addicts betting on Jazz games and then when obvious game throwing happens, they get upset

Legalized gambling. The degenerate gamblers are pissed at Utah-style tanking.

I think tanking in March and April was always common. Sitting young, good players in February less so. 

Also in games where you do play your good players, not putting them back in the 4th quarter also seems egregious- are they injured, resting, or not?

So we don’t talk about the clippers and aspiration is my guess

It’s always been a big thing. Folks hated it when the 76ers were intentionally tanking

I think because of exactly what this post is highlighting. OKC wants the Jazz to actually field a team, so they are using whatever resources they have to push the tanking story to the forefront.

We can’t have OKC in our social club no more.

THAT BETTER NOT BE JOSEPH SMITH UP THERE!

Fuck them. But I never liked Brigham Young.

Oklahoma State did get fined recently for chanting something at BYU…

The flattened lottery odds only made things worse I think because bad teams in a small market can stay bad forever if they don’t draft a superstar, which is a lot harder to do when the worst team drops to 5 after a play in team jumps 10 spots

Lottery isn’t the reason mid teams have the incentive to be bad. Jazz would have no incentive to tank if every team had equal odds. The problem isn’t the lottery, the problem is they neutered the lottery with odds that reward tanking.

A reverse order draft would just reward tanking even more

If you give the worst team the # 1 pick, tanking will just start sooner in a race to the bottom.

If you dont make the playoffs, youre odds at #1 are the same as every other non playoff team. Boom solved.

You are right on Horford, completely wrong on SGA. He was 100% injured and also missed the Olympics in the summer

They did not sit Shai lol. They sat an old ass Al Horford, who wanted to sit out to recover. 

It’s not quite the same as sitting two all-stars to blow a 17 point lead but w.e.

Shai had a legitimate injury tbf. He missed the olympics after ‘being sat’

No no, things are great.

Between tanking, the state of officiating, cap manipulation (Clippers/Kawhi), and sports betting clouding the integrity of the sport, it’s never been better!

Edit: and how can I forget the totally not rigged lottery system??

Sam Presti is Thanos and he won’t stop until he owns every pick in a single draft 

The league is Sam Presti’s bitch tbh. They’ll continue to roll their picks forward for more valuable picks in the future, until they own >50% of the picks in the league, at which point the league will be forced to enact Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, 221 U.S. 1 (1911) to break up the monopoly.

Never ever trust a Presti or an Ainge. Those are the 2 cardinal sins, they will put you in their little cage and you’ll be sorry.

Presti’s pulling both a SGA & Lu Dort at the same time

You’re listening to a Denver nuggets and Utah Jazz writer who is making shit up, lol.

Nets fan spotted in the wild

The NBA fucking hates the Jazz

I feel like every sports league punishes small market teams when it’s a wider league wide issue because it gets the message across, with the least amount of backlash from fans (money).

Different sport but The Saints in the NFL with bounty gate are a prime example of this (everyone was doing it at the time, the team that got punished though was NOLA. they picked them solely because they were one of the smallest markets- so the least amount of backlash.)

Now compare that to the current situation in LA with Kawhi, I doubt the league is really going to do anything about it because it’s a big market. If that was the grizzlies owner or charlotte in contrast they would probably be pushing them out and we wouldn’t have to hear it from Pablo Torre.

Also silver and Presti clearly are buddies or Presti has Silvers nudes because Presti did this same thing for so long putting out some putrid teams while clearly tanking. nothing ever happened like when Philly was forced to remove there GM and put in the leagues stooge- who undid everything and screwed the franchise for the forceable future.

Bro you guys have tanked harder than anyone and have had the best lottery luck of any team in history.

3 of the guys you listed (JDub, Sorber, and Topic) weren’t even picked with their own picks. Those were from picks that the Thunder acquired from other teams. The only two years that the Thunder really tanked were when they drafted Giddey and Chet.

“Multiple high lottery picks” lists 12, 10, 15, and 12 lol

Known to who? Irrelevant jazz writers who have zero knowledge of the workings of the Thunder?

Imagine telling you to win NBA games being considered creating outrage lmao

This is my take. I think he’s purposefully wording it so it seems a lot more nefarious than it probably is.

He says that OKC “propagated” Utahs tanking strategy through “back channels.” Like what? He easily could have just said OKC complained to someone in the league about Utahs tanking and they gave them a list of examples. But that doesn’t sound as juicy.

And yes I do think it’s somewhat hypocritical that OKC complained due to our recent past. But his statement is purposefully vague since it takes a bit of the heat off the jazz Org since some of the spotlight has now shifted from Utahs tanking to how hypocritical OKC is, and it’s also galvanized and united a lot of the Utah fan base against a very unpopular enemy (OKC). Low key impressed by Ainge on this Machiavellian move.

Or maybe OKC is just the worst lol.

Will never happen. NBA needs trades. The soap opera part is more fun than the basketball part for a lot of people.