If the NBA has its way, its draft lottery reforms that go into effect next season will make aggressive tanking a thing of the past. But the thing is that those reforms didn’t apply to the 2017-18 campaign, so we saw a number of NBA teams try to jostle for position atop the 2018 draft.
The bottom of the NBA standings reflected this, as teams that were gunning for the lottery were awfully close to one another. According to Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN, one team jeopardized their ability to get as many ping pong balls in the lottery as possible, which led to their owner freaking out.
“I know of an instance of an owner berating, really berating his coach here in the last several weeks of the season for going in and beating a pretty good team on the road, going, ‘What are you doing?'” Wojnarowski said on his recent podcast with Bobby Marks, per Bleacher Report.
It’s interesting that an owner would chew out his coach over something like this, and of course, everyone who hears Wojnarowski say this will have their mind wonder as to which owner tore into their head coach.
Because we here at Dime fall under the umbrella of “everyone,” we decided to find out. We looked at the bottom seven teams in the NBA, all of which possess their own first round picks this year. We picked an arbitrary date — March 1, 2018 — that would seem to include even the most liberal interpretation of “last several weeks” and identified all of their wins between that point and the final game of the year. Road wins against teams we deem as “pretty good” (which is a subjective term) are in bold.
Dallas Mavericks:
3/6 Nuggets (Home)
3/10 Grizzlies (Home)
3/13 Knicks (Road)
3/27 Kings (Road)
4/3 Blazers (Home)
Phoenix Suns:
4/3 Kings (Home)
4/10 Mavs (Road)
Memphis Grizzlies:
3/17 Nuggets (Home)
3/26 Timberwolves (Road)
3/28 Blazers (Home)
4/8 Pistons (Home)
Atlanta Hawks:
3/4 Suns (Home)
3/20 Jazz (Road)
4/1 Magic (Home)
4/6 Wizards (Road)
4/8 Celtics (Road)
Orlando Magic:
3/2 Pistons (Home)
3/3 Grizzlies (Home)
3/14 Bucks (Home)
3/24 Suns (Home)
4/3 Knicks (Road)
4/4 Mavs (Home)
4/11 Wizards (Home)
Chicago Bulls:
3/2 Mavs (Home)
3/7 Grizzlies (Home)
3/11 Hawks (Road)
3/15 Grizzlies (Road)
3/30 Magic (Road)
4/1 Wizards (Home)
4/3 Hornets (Home)
Sacramento Kings:
3/1 Nets (Home)
3/4 Knicks (Home)
3/9 Magic (Home)
3/14 Heat (Home)
3/16 Warriors (Road)
3/22 Hawks (Home)
4/1 Lakers (Road)
4/6 Grizzlies (Road)
4/11 Rockets (Home)
First things first, look at those pesky Atlanta Hawks! That’s how you compete at the end of the season, folks. It does, however, make me feel like the mad owner did not come from Atlanta or else Wojnarowski would have said “beating a few good teams on the road,” right? I could very well be wrong, but anything is possible.
Looking at this — and it’s totally possible that it happened before March 1 — there seem to be two (or three if you think the logic about the Hawks is off) teams that could have had the incident Wojnarowski described. Perhaps Dallas’ March 13 road win over the Knicks or Orlando’s April 3 road win against the, uh, Knicks again is classified as a road win over the pretty good team, but there’s no way to know for sure. All this surely proves is that some NBA owners, much to the chagrin of Adam Silver, still take tanking very seriously.
