Just when you thought NBA tanking couldn’t get any more egregious, the Sacramento Kings appeared to take it to a whole new level on Tuesday night.
With 3:15 to play in the fourth quarter and the Kings leading the Warriors 101-100, Sacramento coach Doug Christie directed his team to intentionally foul. This is not up for debate. You can see Christie motioning from the sideline for Doug McDermott to foul Seth Curry, a 90% free-throw shooter, 50-plus feet from the ball.
At first glance, this looked like just about the most brazen act of tanking imaginable — to foul a historically good free-throw shooter intentionally when you are currently winning — and that’s really saying something in a league where a third of the teams have been actively trying to lose for the past two months.
As expected, the NBA is looking into this. Commissioner Adam Silver has a major tanking problem on his hands, one that is genuinely threatening to undo the integrity of the league itself. If the investigation finds that Sacramento was taking active steps towards losing on purpose in this blatant a fashion, expect swift and severe punishment. Draymond Green believes the league needs to “fine the hell out of people” in the business of tanking.
It’s hard to disagree with Green. The Kings, however, are maintaining that Christie simply made a mistake by not realizing his team was in the bonus, that he didn’t instruct his team to foul because he wanted to put Curry on the line, but rather because he wanted to stop play to use a timeout he was set to lose once the clock got below three minutes, according to ESPN.
It’s a plausible explanation. It is true in the NBA that you can only have two timeouts available to you for the final three minutes of the fourth quarter, meaning if you have three left, you are going to lose one anyway. So coaches often use this timeout if possible before it goes poof. But if you don’t have possession of the ball, the only way you can call the timeout is at a play stoppage. So you foul to stop play. That wouldn’t be a problem if you weren’t in the bonus; the Warriors would just take the ball out of bounds after the timeout. But again, the Kings were in the bonus. Incompetence is bad, but it isn’t as bad as tanking in today’s NBA. Either way, Curry got free throws after the timeout.
As it turned out, he only made one of them, and McDermott wound up hitting a 3-pointer on the other end for the Kings on a play that looked to be specifically designed during the timeout.
The Kings, for what it’s worth, have gone 7-9 over their past 16 games. Which is to say, if they really are in the pursuit of purposeful losses, they’re not doing a very good job at the moment. They have gone from what was a pretty clear path to a bottom-three record to being tied in the loss column with the Jazz and Nets behind the Wizards and Pacers. Only three of those teams are going to end up with the maximum 14% chance at the No. 1 pick.
On March 15, after Sacramento beat Utah, Christie said “tanking is the last thing I’d do” as “I respect the game too much” and believes it hurts the development of young players.
Perhaps this will all be enough for the league to conclude that this really was just a mistake by Christie and not an act of overt tanking. But there is surely another way this can go, if only on optics alone. Again, Silver knows how bad this tanking epidemic is right now. He’s already said there will be significant changes to the system next year to disincentivize the act. For now, anything that carries even the faint scent of intentional incompetence is likely going to be made an example of.
“Overt behavior like this that prioritizes draft position over winning undermines the foundation of NBA competition and we will respond accordingly to any further actions that compromise the integrity of our games,” Silver said in a statement after the Jazz and Pacers were fined a combined $600,000 sitting healthy players back in early February.
This is not a problem with anything that even resembles a simple solution. A bunch of ideas have been thrown around in terms of lottery reform, and our Sam Quinn has already detailed how each of them could backfire. In the absence of removing the incentive to lose entirely, more than just flattening the odds (which, it could be argued, has actually made the problem worse), teams presented with new rules will simply find new ways of evading them.
You can’t blame them. The chance to acquire franchise-changing talent is worth just about any punishment a commissioner can levy. So again, Silver may have to simply drop the burden-of-proof standard and start fining teams major money for anything that even resembles tanking, even if it was an honest mistake.
Because in the end, there will always be some kind of explanation. Injury management. Minutes restrictions. Honest mistakes. Silver might just have to stop accepting any of them if he doesn’t want his league to sink into a state of crisis.
Some might call that an exaggeration. Maybe it is. But what else do you call it when you’re headed toward half the league having more incentive to lose than win? There is zero chance common fans have any idea who a lot of these players getting real minutes for these teams are. It’s almost at the point where, by February, half of the league is going to be composed of big-league teams and the other half Triple-A.
And they play each other. Every night. And call it honest competition. Silver can say whatever he wants about the NBA being a highlight league, but in the end, people come for real competition. Hell, he’s rightfully worried about the All-Star game not being competitive enough. He obviously gets it.
And so do the teams. They know what they’re doing. Even if Christie really did make an honest mistake in this instance, to act as though any of these tanking teams, Sacramento included, has been doing everything in its power to win over these past few months is insulting. Nobody is dumb enough to believe that, if only because we know teams are too smart to do it.
It needs to be fixed. How to do that, well, that’s why Silver makes more money than just about anyone reading this article. It might start with making the Kings write a very big check that, in this case, maybe they shouldn’t have to write.
