Report: NBA issues tanking warning to Chicago Bulls after loss to Boston Celtics

http://celticswire.usatoday.com/2018/03/06/nba-tanking-warning-chicago-bulls-loss-boston-celtics/



Report: NBA issues tanking warning to Chicago Bulls after loss to Boston Celtics



By: Jared Weiss | 2 hours ago



After the Boston Celtics obliterated the Chicago Bulls Monday night, Shams Charania of Yahoo reports the NBA has issued a tanking warning for resting a healthy Robin Lopez and Justin Holiday.

The NBA issued a warning to the Chicago Bulls this week to stop giving Robin Lopez and Justin Holiday DNP-CD’s, reports Shams Charania of Yahoo Sports.


Lopez has been a healthy scratch since the All-Star break, while Holiday has received a DNP-CD in five of the six games since the break. Now the team is planning to play both vets more minutes for the remainder of the season after this warning, according to Charania.

The warning comes in light of the Bulls’ blowout loss to the Celtics Monday, where they were blown away early by a 19-0 first-quarter run and let the Celtics lead balloon to 37 before chipping away at the end to only lose 105-89.

Starters for nearly the entire season, Lopez and Holiday were both left off the active roster for this game. Omer Asik being the only active player with a DNP-CD.

Lopez, who turns 30 next month before hitting unrestricted free agency, is averaging 12.3 points and 4.7 rebounds per game this year. Holiday, who turns 29 next month, was averaging 13.0 points and 4.5 rebounds in a breakout year as a starter for Chicago.

This is a rare instance of the league enforcing its anti-tanking warning system, allowing the league to warn teams when they feel they are benching healthy rotation players for the purpose of losing. Adam Silver has made it clear the league plans to use this tool in his recent public statements.

It presents a slippery slope argument, as the league office appears to have unchecked latitude to warn or even punish teams for what it perceives tanking. It is one of the few encroachments on team sovereignty, with the league dictating who the teams need to play.

The concern here is that Lopez and Holiday are both currently sitting out of their own volition, even if they don’t really want to. According to the Chicago Tribune’s KC Johnson, Bulls EVP John Paxson presented them with a few options to be deep bench reserves and they elected to bench themselves. The team is playing the end of the bench guys it didn’t give much of a chance to earlier in the year, hoping Bobby Portis will prove he is worth paying this offseason and seeing if they can salvage anything out of the big flyer they took on Cam Payne.

It’s opened up playing time for Noah Vonleh, who didn’t play the first three games after he arrived in Chicago early last month. Chicago is unlikely to bring back Lopez next year, so it’s hard to justify playing him over someone who they want to audition for another contract next year. It comes at the consequence of winning and yes, it certainly may be motivated by the spoils of tanking for a better draft pick. But there is a difference between deliberately throwing a wrench in your team’s engine to try to lose and playing guys who could have a future with your team over guys who don’t.

It was one thing when guys like Eric Bledsoe or Carmelo Anthony were held out, but this seems like a much less significant situation. Chicago may be struggling for wins right now and it should be noted that they were coming off a win over the similarly tanking Dallas Mavericks, whose owner Mark Cuban was just fined an unprecedented $600,000 for publicly admitting to tanking.


But while Chicago is likely going to be losing by a bigger margin in many of these games with Lopez and Holiday on the bench, it increases their chances of long-term success by experimenting with different lineups and fringe players for the future. The league is limiting teams’ ability to make short-term sacrifices for the long-term good in favor of enhancing the immediate product.

The interesting question is what the league’s loud and aggressive foray into legalized sports betting has to do with this new policy. The league has been hinting at addressing tanking in real-time for the past few years, just as it has been quietly making it known that it is prepared to embrace nationwide sports betting. In most European countries, sports betting is at the forefront of the spot, with the British Premier League being a prime example. The league may be looking to stabilize the quality of the games to make its involvement in sports betting more successful as the nation begins to move toward widespread legalization.

Silver has proposed a 1% fee for the league to capture on all betting, something that has been widely derided as excessive and unrealistic. It remains to be seen where this will go from a federal and state legislative perspective, but the league is clearly positioning itself to dominate the sports betting market when it explodes in the near future.




bob
MY NOTE:  So the league fines Marcus Smart for complaining the league is preventing him from competing to the best of his ability and they warn the Bulls for not competing to the best of their ability. This has become completely farcical.
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