It is not just that pick, It is also the Clippers pick since every team under them is bad or tanking so they are basically locked in to be a play-in team no matter whats going happen

Which is wild because they basically tanked every year. Sga even complained he wasn’t playing after the all star break..

As. They. Should.

Boot to the neck time.

OKC don’t leak shit. This is not a Thunder organisation trait.

Tell me the last time you knew who OKC wanted in a draft before they made their pick. Chet? No, there were rumours of them wanting JSmith Jr (remember when his old man got upset on draft day).

Tell me the last time OKC had a disgruntled player that the league knew wanted to be traded? Reggie Jackson??

This whole thing is based on a Jazz beat reporters opinion on a local radio show.

Or just take away lotto combinations

Shit the warriors are paying ~$60m in luxury tax this season, I’m sure most teams would suffer that for a season to have a shot at the top three in this draft 

A individual player has so much more value in basketball as opposed to other sports that yeah, very hard to dissuade tanking

Take the pick away as fine, this would hurt them more.

More like hundreds of millions.

I think fines counting against teams’ cap space would do it

Every game they get fined for tanking, their pick should lose 1 place of protection. Tank 8 times and their pick is no longer protected.

Depends on the owner. The league office only had to threaten to fine the Bulls for sitting Robin Lopez and he was back in action. So instead of being in the running for Luka we got WCJ at #7.

*And like a year later OKC sent Al Horford home and no one cared

Bro they just was making noise about how much these teams were valued in the billions. These finds don’t mean nothing to billionaires and that’s the problem. They’re billionaires that’s chump change. If fines are the cost of doing business, then the amount of that fine isn’t enough to curtail behavior. Otherwise something else more severe should happen to stop the behavior.

And it extends to every avenue of business. If the cost of business exceeds whatever potential penalty that can be levied. It’s worth it.

A x B x C = X. Oversimplified but Fight Club stated it accurately in that little scene

Instead of a fine it should be reduced lottery odds for each infraction. Would defeat the purpose of tanking

If the NBA thinks the fan outcry got loud about mid-season tanking, try and have OKC getting 2 picks in the top ten of the draft.

the funny thing is that everyone was kinda onboard with the anti tanking stuff. until ppl found out it was OKC, then half the fans are like fuck OKC

Cry about it. Thats why luka is gone

And had to tank two years to ensure they dumped it for… nothing

Pick is top 8 protected

lol this is such a Kings fan answer. Love it.

I’m sure Sabonis has needed to miss absolutely every game he’s missed.

The jazz are doing it because they made a bad trade though

Those three teams didn’t tank. They burned it down and reloaded. Tanking is what Utah, Washington are doing

I see a pretty significant difference in the front office putting garbage rosters in place, ruling out players with questionable injuries, trying experimental strategies vs just sitting your entire healthy top 7 players in every 4th quarter.

The problem is that A: the league should always act transparently, particularly a league that’s deeeeeeeply in bed with organised sports gambling, and B: the motivation toward malfeasance surrounding finding out what that number is would be astronomically high.

You can’t do that because teams would just start the tank at the very beginning of the season.

They ought to use the play in mechanism to disincentivize tanking.

Just spitballing here but say they make the odds for the non-playoff/playin teams at 15%, each seed after that between 10-7 gets a 1 percent bump between, so 10th seed is 16% 9th at 17, etc. ending at 6th seed where it gets, I dunno 8% ish maybe and lowering for each team that advances.

Efficient tanking would mean trying to balance in placing between 7-10th seed, improving middling teams. It’s also not a significant bump but min maxing tanking won’t be achieved by taking Ls every season.

Half baked thought though, there’s probably something flawed in the idea.

Silvers wording was not one of oh well this is going away tbh. And I am far from a Silver fan

I agree this is a broken system and I am personally in favor of flattening lottery odds more and making more picks in the lottery top 5 but maybe top 10. This wont solve it but maybe teams wont need to race towards the bottom if there not much reward between being the worst team and the 10th worst team. While I am not against a complete overhaul, I just have not seen a proposal that is better.

Send da fine

You could just eliminate the incentive entirely - every bottom 18 team (to account for play in) gets the same odds.

Or even reverse it - add up the H2H records of all the lotto teams. The team with the highest winning % against the others gets the 1st pick, and so on.

I think instead of just current season as the basis of the lottery odds they should make it average of 3 seasons. This way single season tanking is not that feasible unless of course you already suck last 2 seasons.

But this prevents teams who are just unlucky to have an injury to just give up outright

Still wouldn’t work. For teams that really can’t pull in free agents, hitting on a high pick in a loaded draft is worth any cost– think of it like this. Paolo Banchero is bad. He’s making 134.5 million over the next three seasons. Cameron Boozer will likely go number two and earn 41.8 million over the same time frame. If you were Orlando and someone told you that there was a way you could magically fork over, say, half of the difference between those contracts to have Boozer instead of Banchero, would you not hand over the 46.35 million in a heartbeat? That’s the sort of outlook tanking teams have. They’re never gonna get where they need to be without a big draft win.

These teams that are consistently struggling to build– the Kings, the Wizards, the Jazz, etc– would give up whatever they can to get out of the purgatory of having no hope.

Relegation is the best concept in professional sports 

O dont think they’re saying they would write a blank check to buy the pick. Theyre saying they would pay any amount of fines. Basically they think no amount of fines in the current system outweighs tanking and getting the pick.

Keep the rookie salaries the way they are, no need for it to be a true free agency. Cooper Flagg gets to choose between the Jazz offering him 15m a year, Wizards 14m… Mavs 5m, etc

That would never work, though, because it’s entirely subjective as to what ‘qualifies’ tanking. When the stakes are low– just a fine or something, it’s okay to be wrong if it was ‘technically’ tanking (like the Jazz revealing Jaren Jackson was actually injured and had asked to play one game before shutting down). But if the stakes are as high as what you’re suggesting, that’s potentially franchise-altering punishments being levied. The league would get get sued so, so hard.

The less home games punishment also punishes the fans who already have no control over the quality of the product

Kings fans never get to see a home game again.

This would also somewhat forcibly tank team valuations and strong arm sales. Would be such a clusterfuck that it’d damage incentive the purchase of teams as well as continue to funnel resources to large market teams that already dominate their respective markets.

GM’s start trading positions in their list.

Had me until the end. I’ll allow it.

The problem is that so many picks have aready been traded that you can’t just go moving stuff around like that, particularly when tanking is kind of a ‘what is pornography’ sort of question. At what point does something cross the line into tanking?

These same teams who would write blank checks to cover fines would do the same to sign players above the cap in all sorts of ways. Ballmer would have an entire offshore crypto company to deal with the Uncle Dennises all day.

The richest teams would be planting trees for days.

20+ teams veto this idea.

The best way is no draft. 

Still have teams tanking to avoid the play-in, however thats ~1-2 teams per season.

As a biased heat fan it would fucking sick if they rewarded the play in teams who win it. Obviously it wouldnt work at all and would be awful but would be fun