INGLEWOOD, Calif. (AP) \u2014 NBA Commissioner Adam Silver believes teams are tanking more aggressively this season than the league has seen in recent years, and he is considering many possible remedies to ensure real competition, from taking away draft picks to making wholesale changes to the draft and the lottery.<\/p>\n
Silver immediately addressed the hottest topic in NBA circles<\/a> Saturday in his annual address during All-Star weekend at Intuit Dome<\/a>, making it clear that the NBA will do almost anything to make sure its teams earnestly compete.<\/p>\n Last Thursday, the league issued a $500,000 fine<\/a> to the Utah Jazz and a $100,000 penalty to the Indiana Pacers for sitting healthy players, believing their apparent tanking actions compromised the league’s competitive integrity.<\/p>\n \u201cAre we seeing behavior that is worse this year than we\u2019ve seen in recent memory? Yes, is my view,\u201d Silver said. \u201cWhich was what led to those those fines, and not just those fines, but to my statement that we\u2019re going to be looking more closely at the totality of all the circumstances this season in terms of teams’ behavior, and very intentionally wanted teams to be on notice.\u201d<\/p>\n Silver knows that strong words and six-figure fines might not be nearly enough to compel struggling teams to commit to real competition instead of improving their odds in what’s expected to be one of the deepest drafts in recent history \u2014 and that’s why the NBA is looking at stronger solutions.<\/p>\n \u201cThe league is 80 years old, (and) it\u2019s time to take a fresh look at this and to see whether that\u2019s an antiquated way of going about doing it,\u201d Silver said of current draft process. \u201cUltimately, we need a system to fairly distribute players. It’s in the players\u2019 interest as well as the teams’ that you have a level of parity around the league. There\u2019s only so many jobs and so many cities, but we’ve got to look at some fresh thinking here. I mean, what we\u2019re doing, what we\u2019re seeing right now, is not working.\u201d<\/p>\n The NBA’s competition committee is re-examining the structure of the draft lottery for any ways to minimize the upside of tanking, Silver said. The commissioner also acknowledged that the fines could conceivably be followed by the revocation of draft picks from tanking teams.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is talk about every possible remedy now to stop this behavior,\u201d Silver said.<\/p>\n Yet Silver also acknowledged the essential dilemma at the heart of this problem, one that has bedeviled the league since the 1960s: A team’s draft position is significantly tied to its chances of building a winner.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s so clear that the incentives are misaligned,\u201d Silver said. \u201cMy caveat is, and this is where teams are in a difficult place … that the worst place to be, for example, is a middle-of-the-road team. Either be great or be bad, because then (being bad) will help you with the draft. In many cases, you have fans of those teams, it\u2019s not what they want to pay for, to see poor performance on the floor, but they\u2019re actually rooting for their teams, in some cases, to be bad to improve their draft chances.\u201d<\/p>\n But Silver intends to remind every team that tanking is a betrayal of its relationship with fans, both in their home cities and around the world.<\/p>\n In other topics covered by Silver on Saturday:<\/p>\n Expansion grows closer<\/p>\n The NBA still expects to make decisions on expansion<\/a> this year, starting with more discussions at the Board of Governors meeting next month. The league won’t vote on expansion then, but Silver expects to know whether the league will move on to talk with potential owners.<\/p>\n Silver acknowledged Seattle and Las Vegas are the two obvious candidates for expansion, and he said the league wants to make a decision soon: \u201cI don’t want to tease cities or mislead anyone.\u201d <\/p>\n Clippers investigation<\/p>\n Silver said he has been told that the Los Angeles Clippers<\/a> have been cooperative with the external investigation into their possible circumvention of the salary cap through a suspicious endorsement deal for Kawhi Leonard with a now-bankrupt company.<\/p>\n Silver firmly stated that the investigation and its findings were not purposely delayed while the Clippers host this All-Star weekend. Wachtell Lipton, the white-shoe Manhattan law firm conducting the investigation, has no deadline from the league to produce its findings.<\/p>\n Prediction markets<\/p>\n The NBA is \u201cpaying an enormous amount of attention\u201d to the rise of prediction markets<\/a>, particularly after Milwaukee superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo sparked concern with his investment in Kalshi. Silver didn’t find fault with Antetokounmpo \u2014 whose shares are a \u201cminuscule\u201d position, according to Silver \u2014 but he acknowledged the looming specter of the gambling industry without suggesting a solution.<\/p>\n \u201cIt concerns me in the totality of all this betting that we need a better handle, no pun intended, on all the different activity that\u2019s happening out there,\u201d Silver said.<\/p>\n Silver also admitted the overwhelming size of this task, given that roughly 80 countries allow betting on the NBA while billions more are wagered illegally.<\/p>\n Europe calling<\/p>\n