Game Thread Feb 07, 2026 05:00PM MT: Utah Jazz @ Orlando Magic

MTS said:

You have a very deep misunderstanding of what Adam Silver's job actually is if you think he's going to resolve this by punishing individual teams instead of making structural changes to disincentivize tanking going forward.

Comparing this to the Sterling episode is launching yourself completely outside of reality.

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Tanking is worse than racism.

Article 13 of the NBA Constitution and By-Laws refers strictly to termination of ownership.
It does not appear to refer in any terms to any kind of administratively punishable issues like playing or not playing players....

Saint Cy of JFC said:

The minutes restriction stuff looks bad, but it's still more ethical than flat out sitting players. Jazz still player a tough 48 minutes and everyone on the court was playing to win.

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it optics looked horrible, but i agree that the reality is it's much better than just flat sitting players.

KqWIN said:

Tanking is worse than racism.

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assuming you're not a fan of racism, i take that to mean you'd rather the jazz win and lose their 2026 pick?

Tanktastic said:

Yeah, they did all that. And no-one noticed. Because they had some bums on the court that never had a chance. Whereas the Jazz threw a game in the most open and visible way.


No, Adam Silver's job is to protect the league and it's image.

As long as tanking is a nuisance to a minority of the most committed fans, it's a non-issue.

If suddenly it's on national news that NBA teams are throwing games and laughing about it on the bench, Silver has a problem he actually cares about and has to deal with.

And no, tanking and Sterling aren't comparable. But Sterling just shows that Silver and the NBA can do absolutely anything they want to - if they feel they need to.


Yeah, nice on you cuck.

Guess what 13g says...

(g) Offer, agree, conspire, or attempt to lose or control the score of any game participated in by a Team operated by a Member of the Association, or fail to suspend immediately any officer or any Player or other employee of the Member who shall be found guilty, in a
court of law or in any hearing sanctioned by this Constitution and By- Laws, of offering, agreeing, conspiring, or attempting to lose or control the score of any such game or of being interested in any pool or wager on any game in which a Team operated by a Member of the
Association participates.

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"Yeah, they did all that. And no-one noticed. Because they had some bums on the court that never had a chance. Whereas the Jazz threw a game in the most open and visible way."
So whether it being visible or not is what determines if it is illegitimate? Ok, but as explained numerous times, not against the rules.

"No, Adam Silver's job is to protect the league and it's image."
No. Adam Silver's job is to do whatever the **** the owners want him to do. He is just the mouthpiece. They obviously don't care very much about what is happening, because any previous change was minor. Even if they come out and say "Jazz bad. Stop," They won't do anything other than more minor changes. It doesn't hurt them at all.

"As long as tanking is a nuisance to a minority of the most committed fans, it's a non-issue. If suddenly it's on national news that NBA teams are throwing games and laughing about it on the bench, Silver has a problem he actually cares about and has to deal with."
Still nope. It didn't matter when the Sixers, Spurs, OKC, Dallas and many others did it openly.

"Yeah, nice on you cuck."
There is a certain type of person who uses this word in this context. On a totally separate note, how was Kid Rock's performance last night?

"Guess what 13g says..."
As @outerspacefan said, it only applies to termination of ownership. Literally the title of Section 13.

I kinda wondered when someone was going to be gutsy enough to do this. The Anti-tanking rules about holding out players always had a really obvious loophole that you could just put someone in the game for a couple minutes and sit them the rest of the way. This wasn't even all the way to that. I half expect in the future a team to just put a guy out for the opening tip, call an immediate time out, and sit him the rest of the game.

It shouldn't even be that controversial of a strategy. We played our stars because the rules say we have to. We played them 20+ minutes to let them get a chance to mesh, and to let them get their stats so they stay happy. When we satisfied our obligations, we sat them and let the young guys play. They clearly weren't instructed to play poorly or lose on purpose, they were still trying. Young guys, important game minutes, development like that is very reasonable for a team focused solely on the future.

But I think this is still a pretty big deal. Don't think there's any real way to legislate all the edge cases out that would let teams exploit loopholes like this. Don't think the NBA is going to be able to stand for it. Not because of fan experience or whatever (though that's what they'll say its about), but because of gambling ramifications.

Nothing anyone has done or is proposing to do is going to fix this. Removing lotto protections from traded picks won't do anything. We'd still be doing this even if we didn't owe the pick to OKC, because we aren't doing it to avoid losing a middling pick, we're doing it to maintain a non-trivial amount of lotto balls in the hopes of getting a franchise-changing top pick.

So I think we've just accelerated things. I think the NBA was happy to keep pushing meaningless tweaks and changes designed to make it look like they are trying to fix tanking without actually making any real impact, so long as tanking teams played along and played the 'pretend injury' game. But I think now they're going to need to do something real. Think we may have just caused the end of the reverse-order draft.