In 1919, eight members of the Chicago White Sox attended a series of meetings and plans were hatched to throw the World Series in favor of the Cincinnati Reds.
The fix was far from the first in baseball. At the time, America’s pastime was in its infancy and the notion of ‘integrity of the game’ was also in its infancy. Gamblers and players routinely fraternized, and the occasional fix was more or less accepted — maybe not always with good grace, but without a great deal of protest.
Then the World Series was fixed.
The response was not particularly swift. White Sox owner Charles Comiskey and the rest of the league’s owners spent most of 1920 trying to bury the story, but when a grand jury was convened to investigate the conduct of the Series in the context of laws against gambling in general, it became hard to keep a lid on what actually happened. In September of that year, Eddie Cicotte confessed and the scandal exploded onto the front page.
Ultimately, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, the first commissioner of a U.S. professional sport, instituted lifetime bans against the eight players who sat in on meetings to throw the Series. Landis’ ban was based on players knowing about the fix, so even guys that arguably didn’t participate in the fix like Shoeless Joe Jackson were banned for life.
Fast forward to the 1980s in the NBA and maybe Gloria was right…
In the 1981-82 season, that prince of an owner, Donald Sterling, publicly suggested that his team should lose games to secure a top pick. He was fined a record $10,000 by David Stern, but there were no further consequences — not even when Sterling allowed the team’s active roster to fall as low as eight players that season.
Two years later, the Houston Rockets decided to sit their starters in order to secure the top pick in the pre-lottery draft. Their reward? One of the best centers ever to play the game, Hakeem Olajuwon. Granted it took a decade for that to pay off with a pair of championships, but the Rockets definitely benefited from playing to lose.
Also competing for the bottom of the draft that season? The Chicago Bulls. They got Michael Jordan with the third pick, and the rest, for them, is history as well.
In 1996-97 multiple teams, the Celtics included, tanked for a chance to pick Tim Duncan, in the NBA’s relatively new lottery arrangement which gave the worst teams better odds at getting a top pick.
In the 2010s, Sam Hinkie made tanking a publicly declared priority for the Philadelphia 76ers, with the team deliberately stripping itself of competent players in order to secure multiple top draft picks (picks which Hinkie wasted, for the most part, but that’s another story for another day).
Tanking has become as accepted an affront to the integrity of basketball as gambling once was in baseball.
There is no material difference between the players throwing games for monetary gain and GMs throwing seasons in order to secure high draft picks.
In both cases, the individuals involved are deliberately doing less than their best in order to lose.
It’s true that the NBA has finally done something to minimize the most egregious forms of tanking, but this new system, with its dramatic rise in odds for 4-10 finishers has basically created a huge disincentive for teams that are ‘on the bubble.’ Teams sitting in the gap between the 10th place in the lottery standings and the 19th place teams that are assured playoff spots have little incentive to push for a better record and every incentive to play for a worse one.
If you finish in 11th place, you get one lottery ball. If you finish in 10th place, you get three.
All this new approach has done is change the way teams will choose to tank and how they’ll pursue it. Changing the goal from ‘being the worst team in the league’ to ‘being bad enough to get three lottery balls’ doesn’t change the fact that the team’s management is still trying to lose.
Sure, the optics might be a bit better, but tanking is still cheating. It’s still a violation of trust.
What can be done?
Sadly, not much. Gambling-influenced play typically comes out due to criminal investigations, where law enforcement agencies have both the power to seize communications and the authority to threaten real consequences against individuals complicit in these schemes.
Recall that it was a criminal investigation that brought the Black Sox scandal to light.
With a matter like tanking, there aren’t any laws being broken.
And in any event, tanking is often done with a nod and a wink. The NBA might have the power to compel teams to turn over emails and other correspondence, but these aren’t likely to feature an owner and a GM chatting about how they’re going to aim for a top pick in the lottery.
When tanking is egregious, as what happened with the Pacers and the Jazz this season, the league’s response is, basically, a slap on the wrist.
Yes, under the new lottery arrangement, the league has the ability to impose more severe punishment for conduct perceived as tanking, and this is a good first step.
However, like locked screen doors that only stop honest burglars, penalties for obvious acts of tanking only affect the stupidest teams. Any team can get around these penalties by cooking up plausible-sounding reasons for trading away good players (‘saving on cap costs’), and for resting starters (‘injury recovery’).
In order for tanking to stop, the collective attitude of fans — which is ultimately what drives league policy — needs to change. As long as we pretend that tanking is anything but cheating, it’s going to continue.
As long as we believe that trying to win is optional, as long as we’re content to see teams trying to lose, we will be complicit in the active undermining of the integrity of the game.
Who knew the Knicks had it in them?
I’m going to wrap up this column by noting that we might have another ‘fo-fo-fo’ in the making.
Yeah, this means that Jamie Dolan might get to hoist a Finals trophy, and it means that I got my “Spurs in six” prediction quite wrong, but in the end, I’m fine with it.
I don’t particularly care for the Knicks, but I’m sick and tired of the notion that the Western Conference is head-and-shoulders better than the East. It’s such an accepted narrative, that I’d be happy to see the East’s third seed spank the West’s second seed, even if it means having to deal with Knicks fans acting like this isn’t the team’s first championship since 1973.
With the C’s out of the playoffs, I’ve been in favor of maximum chaos, and the Knicks winning a title is about the maximumest chaos that we can get short of human sacrifice and dogs and cats living together.