Last night, the eyes of the world were on Super Bowl LX in Santa Clara, where the Seattle Seahawks completely locked down the New England Patriots offense in an uncompetitive and rather boring affair, handing the city of Boston its second defeat of the day.
With the NFL season concluding, the NHL on Olympic break, and MLB still a few weeks away from even beginning its preseason (let alone Opening Day on March 25), the NBA is now the sole major North American sport active and has a unique opportunity to take advantage.
Sure, they’re going head-to-head against the 2026 Winter Olympics, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and some people (like me) don’t love watching the prerecorded primetime slots and just go on Peacock during the day to watch various interesting events.
This is the NBA’s time, and with how All-Star Weekend has slowly deteriorated, they need to make the individual games themselves count. By the time March Madness comes around next month, the nation’s eyes will start to wander.
With this great opportunity coming for the the league, let’s see how it’s been going.
Tanking is nothing new. When a team has no chance of being competitive, they’ll usually do whatever is possible to make sure they get the best possible lottery odds. After all, the 2026 draft class is projected to be one of the best in recent memory.
Severe tanking measures have been done in the past, exaggerating injuries to ensure defeats by keeping starters out longer than they need. It’s easy to justify some of these, especially in March and April.
But the most shameful, most disgusting, and most unjustifiable forms of tanking are when a team’s best players are healthy and able to play and are inexplicably removed from the game when it matters most.
What the Wizards and Jazz did last week is the encapsulation of the NBA’s biggest problem. It’s not the All-Star Game’s uncompetitiveness, it’s not the rise in Achilles injuries, it’s not load management.
It’s blatant tanking.
Let’s start with the Wizards, who made not one, but two massive trades in the span of a month to revitalize a team that has been lost since John Wall’s career fell apart due to injury during the pandemic. On January 9, they took a gamble in acquiring former all-star Trae Young from the Atlanta Hawks for essentially nothing, only dealing salary filler in CJ McCollum and Corey Kispert.
Just before the deadline, they took a bigger swing on another injured, former all-star. They called up the Dallas Mavericks and swung a highly convoluted trade that sent Anthony Davis to Washington for a fairly underwhelming package that was headlined by two low-value first-round draft picks.
With Davis and Young adding to an untouched core that has building blocks in Alex Sarr, Bilal Coulibaly, and Kyshawn George, the Wizards have a team that could absolutely compete if playing at full strength. Of course, they’re in no rush to do so, shutting down Davis (and probably Young) for the season.
This move is two-pronged. For one, Davis was likely never returning due to a severe hand injury, and Young has multiple issues that need some time off. For a team that is not trying to win (and with a loaded draft class), it’s completely understandable for them to be shut down.
It’s especially important when you consider that the Wizards cannot afford to slide in the draft. Years and years ago, as part of the trade that brought Russell Westbrook to Washington, the Wiz shipped off a heavily-protected, conditional first-round pick that made its way to the Knicks. This is the final year of the condition, and it is down to being top-eight protected. If the Wizards do not finish in the bottom four, they will have a (slim) chance of their pick falling to No. 9 and going to New York.
Obviously, we Knicks fans want that pick, but we know they’re not gonna let it happen. That’s fine. What isn’t fine, though, is the way they’ve treated the sport lately.
As previously shown, they closed a tank-off with the Kings last Sunday with a very suspect lineup before getting obliterated by our Knicks in DC. They then improbably upset Detroit, just one day before those same Pistons beat the breaks off a shorthanded Knicks team.
You’d think that them stunning the top-seeded Pistons in Detroit would be a sign they’re still trying to compete, but it isn’t.
Alex Sarr, the team’s pride and joy and former No. 2 overall pick, was benched in the fourth quarter. Justin Champagnie, who played tremendously in the first half, was benched in the fourth quarter. Bub Carrington and Kyshawn George, two young guys who would benefit from situations like these and started, were benched in the fourth quarter.
The lineup that the Wizards used to close a game against the second-best team in basketball:
Sharife Cooper-Bilal Coulibaly-Jamir Watkins-Will Riley-Anthony Gill
Did they win? Yes. Did they want to win? Absolutely not.
So what do you think they did a few days later when they entered another tank-off with the Brooklyn Nets?
They sat Sarr, George, and Coulibaly with minor ailments, so minor that they played the next day. They then overplayed Riley and Watkins, while giving undrafted free agent Keshon Gilbert more minutes than Carrington and Champagnie.
They got blown out. They trailed by 34 just 17 minutes into the game.
Let’s move on to the Jazz, who arguably did something worse on Saturday night.
Utah, like the Wizards, made a bold move to acquire a former all-star in a bad situation, swinging a big trade with the Memphis Grizzlies to acquire former Defensive Player of the Year Jaren Jackson Jr.
That forms an even more intriguing core with Lauri Markkanen, Ace Bailey, and Keyontae George. Imagine if they can also add a top draft pick!
Well, the Jazz are in the exact same situation as the Wizards. Through a bizarre Derrick Favors salary dump in 2021, they are also sending a top-eight protected pick to a team that doesn’t need it: the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Now, many would argue that the Jazz doing whatever nefarious tactics necessary to keep the pick is better than letting OKC have an extra lottery pick, and I won’t argue that.
That said, what they did on Saturday night was a disgrace to the sport.
Jackson made his team debut in Orlando to face off against the stagnant Magic. The connection between him and Markkanen was working, and the team was coasting, despite George being extremely limited due to an understandable minutes restriction after missing two weeks with an ankle injury.
The Jazz led 94-77 with under 14 minutes to go. It’s not an impossible deficit, but the game was almost in the bag.
But something strange happened. Jusuf Nurkic, who has played well this season, subbed out with 4:14 left in the third and never returned.
Markkanen subbed out with 3:24 left and never returned. Jackson played the rest of the third quarter, but hit the bench to start the fourth and never returned.
Those, combined with George’s minutes restriction, coincidentally only allowing him to play in the first half, had a fairly talented Jazz team playing this lineup in the final minutes:
Isaiah Collier-Cody Williams-Ace Bailey-Brice Sensabaugh-Kyle Filipowski
Not as bad as the Wizards lineup, but just as inexcusable. This lineup, predictably, got snowed in by a desperate Magic team and wound up losing the game. Despite the game coming down to the final seconds, the dynamic duo who combined for 49 points in 52 minutes never returned.
Neither Jackson nor Markkanen is injured. Neither of them cleared 30 minutes. In what world is this a normal minutes distribution for a game that was decided in the final 30 seconds?
NBA.com
How do you have Filipowski close a game that he didn’t enter until the fourth quarter? How can you even justify this?
The league is in a bad place if there are multiple teams going to these lengths in February. This isn’t even talking about the teams that are clearly overexaggerating injuries (ahem Indiana) to ensure they don’t win enough games to ruin their master plan of reloading with a top draft pick in 2026-27.
So how do you fix this? Realistically, it’s a slippery slope. You’d have to define a line that cannot be crossed and stick to it, but teams will just find another way around it.
Off the top of my head, one thing the NBA can do is vow severe consequences for situations like these, where players are inexplicably benched. But then, all you’ll get is more exaggerated injuries. The only way to possibly police this is a modern-day Gestapo that forces tanking teams to physically prove a player cannot go, which would be nearly impossible since most players have some sort of ailment at any given time that a team can use as an excuse.
The most practical solution that doesn’t involve this, however, is removing pick protections. It’s an entirely reasonable premise, as it prevents the Wizards and Jazz from doing diabolical things like this to risk losing their pick. It would also prevent the Pacers from doing…whatever the hell they did with the Ivica Zubac trade.
Or, if you want to get really bold, threaten to police teams extremely hard if they hard-tank to get around a pick protection. Remember when Adam Silver slapped Mark Cuban on the wrist for blatantly tanking so the Mavericks would keep their pick in 2023 when it was top-10 protected? If a team blatantly tanks, especially in the fashion that Utah and Washington are doing, the NBA should threaten to remove pick protections and fully convey the draft pick.
Would that dissuade tanking? Probably not, or at least not until someone had the hammer dropped on them. If Silver took the Mavericks’ pick away in 2023 instead of giving them a BS $500,000 fine, do you think the Jazz and Wizards do what they did?
I’ve been trying not to come off as a salty Knicks fan that wants the Wizards pick, but as a concerned NBA fan. Adam Silver, what do you want for your league? Do you want packed arenas with millions of fans tuned into games across the country? Do you want your premier talent on the court to motivate and inspire the next generation of fans and players?
If the answer is yes, something has to be done about this, because it’s only going to get worse as the final two months approach.