How do we feel about ESPN saying the Jazz are to blame for tanking? I feel Danny and Austin are taking advantage of the system the league has created.
How do we feel about ESPN saying the Jazz are to blame for tanking? I feel Danny and Austin are taking advantage of the system the league has created.
26 comments
They really out here acting like the Jazz are the first team to do this?
There are 5 teams with worse records and the jazz are set to beat their preseason over/under
I said on /r/nba they should come up with a solution to tanking back when the Sixers were doing it and I just got hate for it. People really didn’t seem to think it was bad at all.
That was 13 years ago and the NBA hasn’t done anything, so it seems like they don’t mind at all either.
The NBA will never fix tanking (because it’s impossible to fix without drastic measures like instituting relegation), but they’ll sure as hell milk all the ads they can during the “how should the NBA fix tanking?” segments on NBA partnered shows.
Funny how now that it is the Jazz everyone wants to voice an opinion. Remind me how the Spurs got Tim Duncan and 76ers got Embiid? The double standard is annoying and sickening. More sickening than the Jazz tanking.
I swear every couple years the media dredges up something new as a reason to hate the Jazz that doesn’t feel justified. It was exhausting to deal with but I’ve reached the point where I just don’t care about these dumb narratives anymore.
How about the Wizards just flat out sitting their two all stars for the rest of the season? What about Ivica Zubac suddenly can’t play now that he’s on the pacers? What about MPJ sitting out games the nets need to loose. What about the kings not playing their starters. Not to mention the mavericks just offloading anybody who might help them win. At least the Jazz are playing their guys. Who cares if they want to get the young guys minutes at the end of the game and get some clutch time minutes? They won the last game. How about the Jazz do what everybody else is doing and just sit everybody for the rest of the season. If people want to complain about the Jazz they need to look at the other teams doing way worse. When the Jazz played their guys Pacers. They sat their whole team. Everybody loves to hate the Jazz. They never move up in the lottery. They tried the other way and ended up with a 9th pick and the next year a 10th pick. Last year they did it right and they moved back in the lottery for the third time in a row. I think the draft is rigged. I’d love to be proven wrong.
Hey it got ESPN talking about the Jazz foe the first time in like 20 years!
It’s the NBAs fault for setting it up this way. They say they don’t like this behavior and then reward it.
Easy fix. Remove the draft. Just let all incoming players be free agents. Keep the salary cap but remove salary limits for rookies. Then teams will have to persuade players to join them with a combination of money, vision for the future and the fit of the player. Easy.
I love that the Jazz are making the whole league cry.
F*ck the national sports media! What a bunch of hypocrites!
Just more proof the media is a joke.
We have LA paying Kawhi under the table to circumvent the cap, Giannis investing in Kalshi, and gambling companies with their finger prints everywhere. All are much more dangerous to the integrity of the NBA than the Jazz doing something every other team has also done before.
We’re just a convenient scapegoat since people love to hate on Utah even at the best of times.
i don’t get why the draft isn’t just completely random, seems like the most fair scenario
Everybody that doesn’t make the playoffs gets the same chance at the number one.
I have a great idea to make sure we’re not blamed for tanking… we just have our starters foul out in the first quarter because they were playing “hard defense”.
F*ck all of them; the NBA, Adam Silver, and all the numpties in the sports media. The Utah Jazz should do what they feel is best for their own interests because the NBA and Adam Silver f*cked the Jazz over in the 2025 draft. Cooper Flagg should have been a Jazz man, but they made a deal with the Mavericks to send Flagg there if the Mavs traded Luka to the Lakers. They also sent the Spurs and 76ers above us in the draft to help those teams out.
So I do not care what any of them think or feel. All of them have their own agendas, none of which intend to do right by the game or the Jazz.
Give us Cooper Flagg first, and only then they will have a leg to stand on and talk about right and wrong. Until then, if the Jazz want to tank in this manner and improve their stock, then I’m all for it!
I don’t understand the criticism but for a completely different reason. I swear it was only a few years ago the idea of developing players was a talking point for bad teams. Yeah the Jazz could have a better shot of winning up to 30 games if they played “Veterans” like Markkanen, JJJ, Love, and Nurk. But you need a team of more than those guys with NBA experience to be successful in the league, and it’s not like the Jazz are a team people are lining up to be traded to and take team friendly deals.
So the Jazz need people with NBA experience. Teams have been using the Jazz for the same purpose for years now to give their bench NBA experience so it’s not like any team criticizing the Jazz right now aren’t doing the same thing, they’re just better teams so they’re winning more games. Against the magic that 4th quarter notably Bailey, Sensabaugh, Filipowski, Williams, and Collier were playing big minutes.
Those are the guys that need this close game NBA game experience if the Jazz are the be better in the long run. And they almost pulled it off too! This isn’t some unethical tank of taking out all the good players and pulling 2 way contracts and g league players who never have and never will play in the NBA. The Jazz are trying to develop the pieces they will use to win. I thought this is literally the exact way the league wants teams to develop players. Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
Yes, come up with a good way to stop tanking. And until then, f×%k you!! The system has been created this way, and the jazz are trying to take advantage of it just as has been done ever since I remember. God, I want the jazz just to come up with injuries to everyone and go for the whole f$#k you tank. It’s obvious to anyone paying attention that you can’t give up that pick to okc.
Sitting good players for the ENTIRE game with phantom injuries = totally acceptable tanking.
Sitting good players for the last 1-2 quarters of the game = ruining the integrity of the league.
Make it make sense.
Well the Jazz actually have a 50-50 record since they started pulling their stars in the fourth quarter
I genuinely think this is on the NBA. They have organized the league to encourage tanking. They could choose to stop allowing pick protections, for example. I mean, if we had been forced to trade our 1st rounder without protections, we’d be pushing to win. They could adopt the PWHL’s Gold Plan. They could make it so the lottery is only between the bottom 3 teams or something. Instead, the NBA just keep lowering lottery odds for the worst teams. All that does is prevent the worst teams from getting better and encourages middle-tier teams from actually trying to push for the playoffs. I would rather my team lose for a bit and get a 2% chance of getting Wemby/Flagg than watching them get swept by a juggernaut. A standard draft style would allow teams to tank, they’d take turns drafting great prospects early, and then those teams would start trying to win right away. Instead we have a setup that leaves certain franchises devoid of hope because every year some stupid ping pong balls give the Mavs the 1st pick, so we tank another year. It’s their system, the Jazz are just playing the game.
It’s the nature of this sport. If you hit on one guy, you get 10 years of success. Sure, you can find a gem later in the draft, but most blue-chips go VERY early. So, heaven forbid we do what is legal, according to league rules, to try and do what every other team has done at some point in their histories.
Besides, how would they even define tanking? Half the league just traded good players for worse players and picks. That seems like tanking to me? What about Anthony Davis needing to recover or whatever manure they are trying to sell in DC? Would they prefer we lie and say Lauri has a sore back? (Personally, I’d rather see Lauri/Key/JJJ ball out for 3 quarters, and then watch the young guys get valuable minutes. It’s exceptionally intelligent and I am all for it.) Do you want to require a certain number of minutes for players? (Fine, but that isn’t a thing now and I don’t think it ever will be. So let the Jazz play the game you set up)
End of rant
#trusttheprocess where was the fucking anti tanking takes during that era?
This is a league that has a concept of “superstar calls”.
Large markets are clearly treated better than small markets.
“Rookies don’t get those calls” is a common phrase among commentators across the league.
Gambling has run rampant, players are literally caught in gambling schemes.
But yeah, bad teams being bad, that’s the thing that’s REALLY ruining the integrity of the game, lmao.
I take issue with his wording. If you want to say you don’t like what the Jazz are doing,
Acting like the Jazz are doing something that is “messing with the integrity of the NBA” is completely nonsense and blowing it up out of proportion, like somehow the Jazz are creating the problem itself. Complete garbage take. It’s not even close to the severity or length of many other tanking jobs we’ve seen around the league in the last 15 years.
The Pacers almost won the GD championship last year and are now the 2nd worst team in the league while their star recovers. But yeah, the Jazz are the problem.
I mean, I get why people want to harp on the Jazz, we’re being extremely cavalier with our intentions by obviously pulling our best guys in the fourth. Can’t say a lot of other teams have done it quite as boldly as us. But I’ve yet to see anyone give a reason as to how this is actually worse than more “traditional” tanking besides just being more obvious. It’s objectively a better, more watchable product than the teams that are straight sitting their stars the entire game or the ones that have rosters so garbage that there’s no one good enough to sit. It actually is a theoretically reasonable development strategy to experiment and build chemistry between different rotations and to give young players experience in crunch time which is usually very hard to naturally come by. And it’s a technique that literally only works when a tank is coming to an end which should be a good thing for the people who complain about teams being perpetually bad.
The league’s problem with tanking extends far beyond just the Jazz and the specific way we’re doing it. Even if tomorrow they said we have to play Lauri and JJJ in the fourth it wouldn’t change the fundamental problem, that like a third of the league at any given point is heavily incentivized to lose. And it’s not like people don’t know that, acting like it’s a uniquely Jazz problem is very silly and that energy would be better spent trying to do a rethink of the entire system that incentivizes this behaviour.