Story by
Celtics refused to tank. The rest of the NBA should be forced to follow. Here's how
- Story by
- Celtics refused to tank. The rest of the NBA should be forced to follow. Here's how
Well, it's been a while since I have sat down to write something for HoopsHype, but I am excited to be back! The topic I'd like to speak about today in my first offering is one of three major things in my humble-ish opinion that need to be reviewed in the NBA today.
In the weeks to come, I'll work through issues two and three, but to start, let's dive right in with… TANKING!
Advertisement
Like so many people right now, I am happy to propose a fix, but I'd like to start by describing why tanking is such a toxic practice that has been eroding everything in the league for years.
Purposely losing games runs absolutely counter to everything that professional sports is supposed to be about on every level. The thought that we are taking people who have worked their entire lives to reach the highest level and then incentivizing their organizations to lose… When you experience how soul-crushing that is, it creates a disappointment and emptiness that can feel worse than never having made it at all. While compensation may provide short-term relief, being associated with deliberately losing can severely damage a coach's or player's future value and prospects.
I often equate it to rebuilding a house. Say a person buys a piece of land and wants to build their dream house, but at the time of purchase there is a home already on the property. Plans are made, architects are brought in, and the vision of what the property will become after a very laborious process is all anyone sees and becomes excited by, and rightfully so. But of all the different trades brought in, perhaps the least skilled and most likely quickest forgotten are the demolition crews.
From my experience in the NBA, it's rare for an organization to deliberately lose, rebuild, and then succeed with the same team members who handled both the demolition and the subsequent development. The reason this doesn't happen, in my opinion, is that actively accepting the directive of losing on purpose erodes the characteristic that truly defines the NBA and its participants and makes this all so entertaining… and that is "competitiveness."
Advertisement
Competition and the need to win are the principles on which all of this is built on. We all like to think we have it; it's what draws us in and inspires greatness. But every now and then you meet a person who will argue for an hour over a rule definition in a game of UNO, leave the table in disgust, and then talk about the perceived injustice for a week and how much it bothered them (see Jimmy Butler ),and you realize, "Oh wait, there are levels to this." Those levels are where the special in all of this lies.
IMAGN
I will give you a real-time example of this: the Boston Celtics . There isn't a person among us who didn't watch them lose earlier in the playoffs than expected last year see their best player go down to a catastrophic injury who didn't expect them to purposely take a step back. Also working against them, along with these two things, was the implementation of the hard-cap world we now live in in the NBA, which made all the contracts they had recently signed under the old system unsustainable, to the extent that the owners of the team sold the franchise.
Leading into the draft and free agency, we began to see them make cost-cutting moves to lower their team salary and seemingly accept their fate: 2025-2026 would be a reset year for the Celtics. Immediately, history would have shown us that "forward-thinking" teams take the opportunity to lower payroll, bottom out, and chase a Top 3 draft pick in what we can all see is a transformational draft. The reality is, we have seen teams around them with a fraction of the accomplishments not only do this for one year but multiple years to a mixed bag of results and still be undeterred.
Advertisement
I, like everyone else, assumed they would do the same thing. When free agency began, they requested a meeting with a client I had at the time who had underperformed for years and was going to be on a vastly reduced contract, with the thought that if he could prove he was healthy, his value would return. I looked at it as a great opportunity for both sides, but I also had my eyes open and expected in the meeting to be told of a different directive than competing for a championship in 2025–2026. That was until our meeting began at 6:01 p.m. on July 1st. I have done this agent thing for over 20 years, and I have participated in countless free-agent meetings for players of all levels, and I can honestly tell you I have never in my entire career been more impressed with a coach than I was with Joe Mazzulla.
Up until this point in time, I had only met him in passing and never had something of substance to work with him on, so I didn't know him much. In the NBA, we do this thing where we exist in each other's orbits, and everyone kind of knows everyone else, but you don't ever truly know someone until you have to work with them on something. For 20 minutes, I was lucky enough, along with my client, to listen to Joe speak, and I quickly realized that he was a human being who creates his own reality. If I or anyone else thought for a second that he was a person who didn't look at what the Celtics were facing this year as an opportunity versus an impossibility, then it probably explained why I watch for a living and he's the man in the arena.
By the end, I coult tell: 1. The amount of alignment and respect from Brad Stevensto his coaches was unparalleled; and 2. If anyone asked Joe to do anything other than compete like the world was about to end, they would probably only get the chance to ask him once. Fast-forward 58 games, and not shocking to me, Joe was right. If I am lucky enough to do this another 20-plus years, I highly doubt I will ever see another midstream pivot with this amount of success, and most importantly, a group that was built through adversity versus giving in to it. And that, to me, is the principle that all of this has to be built on. Period. End of sentence.
IMAGN
Now, do I think we can presently fault organizations that chose to tank? Absolutely not, because the system is set up in a way that incentivizes them to do so. The system is the issue.
Advertisement
Another story I want to tell you involves a person I have known forever: Jay Triano. I have never met a person who loves the game and is obsessed with it in various ways as much as Jay. If you ever meet him, ask him to show you his three-basketball shot that immediately ends every game of horse if he gets you to an S. Only a person who has spent a shocking amount of time in a gym with a basketball (or three) is capable of doing that. Jay was coaching a game for the Phoenix Suns where his team was tied with 0.7 seconds left and they had the ball on the sideline. Jay was, remarkably, the only person in the gym who had memorized the basketball rule book so thoroughly that he knew you are allowed to offensive goaltend an inbounds pass according to the rules. So the play Jay drew up was for the inbounder to purposely shoot the ball at the basket and try to make it and for Tyson Chandler to offensive goaltend it at the very last second to win the game - and guess what, it worked.
To me, outside of Paul Westphalpurposely calling a timeout he didn't have, it was the smartest play I had ever seen anyone think of on the fly, and to this day it still might be. I say this to make a point: if there is a rule on page 1,130, line 80 of the rule book, there is someone much smarter than all of us in basketball who will find it and exploit it. Unfortunately for the thought of competitiveness, the rules for tanking exist on like page three, and all of us understand them. Therefore, the pertinent question becomes: what steps should be taken to resolve this issue?
This is my suggestion:
Thirty teams in the league. Thirty ping-pong balls in the hopper. Draft order is set by random selection, one through 30, every year. If your team gets a Top 3 pick, you cannot get another Top 3 pick for the next three seasons. This is the only external control of the process.
Advertisement
You want drama and entertainment? Imagine the draft show with 30 balls in play and a one-in-thirty (or one-in-twenty-seven) chance of getting the first overall pick. I think that's something every fan base would watch.
How would this help in practice? Well, I have believed for years that for sure there are can't-miss prospects in every draft, but the reality is there are not as many as you would think. The truth is, the value of a given draft pick is truly tied to the organization making that pick. We see this play out every year. By doing what I am suggesting, principles like structure, environment, and stability that create world-class organizations would become an absolute premium. Concepts like development and investment that are little more than cool buzzwords in way too many organizations would actually exist.
The tools that make organizations successful in promoting these qualities would also become a premium. One of these tools is veteran players. The NBA I work in today does not have enough vets. We need the young players who are coming into the NBA to learn from battle-tested mentors they are sharing locker rooms with. It is the only way to get to a position of sustainable success. In today's NBA, it's surprising and frustrating how often problems end up in the media or public sphere. I frequently think, "If that team had veteran players, this issue would have been dealt with internally."
If we actually want the gifted rookies we bring into the NBA each year to fulfill their promise - not only as investments as basketball players but more importantly as people - we need to give them examples and mentors they can learn from through osmosis, who meet them on their level, and right now we just aren't doing this.
Advertisement
The other area this would help us with is stability with coaches. Coaches would be given the space to truly create their ideas of what culture actually looks like, what true professional environments are, and execute those visions. Ultimately, the focus should return to what is most important: measurable outcomes and actual results, rather than relying on the frequently overused and increasingly disregarded term "potential."
The greatest lesson I have ever received in my professional career was given to me by a client shortly after I started working with him a lifetime ago. At the time, I was doing what agents and most people in life do, and that's discussing scenarios and what-ifs and possibilities, and he stopped me. He said, "Listen, I like you, but don't ever waste my time talking about a what-if or something that doesn't end up happening, because it will make me lose my trust in you. Only talk to me about things that you know you either can or will make happen."It's a lesson that I took to heart, and to be honest, I have applied it to every area of my life. It's a principle that I see some NBA teams live by and others not, and miraculously, the teams that I see constantly not doing this every year seem to end up back in the very same place, tied to the very same dollar and dream.
Bernie Lee is a long-time NBA agent who represents six-time All-Star Jimmy Butler
We highly recommend you add HoopsHype as a preferred source on Google. You just have to click here .
This article originally appeared on Hoops Hype: Celtics refused to tank. The rest of the NBA should be forced to follow. Here's how
