The Mavericks THREW A GAME they needed to win.
The Pacers WON a game they needed to lose.
By Greg Doyel, Indianapolis Star:
“The 2023 NBA Playoffs have started, and that’s fun. The NBA is a league fueled by superstars, more than any other sports league in the world. Teams have just five players and all that. Don’t make me defend that sentence about the NBA being defined by its superstars more than any other … well, you read it. And it’s true.
But so is this:
The NBA’s playoff fun — the drama, the superstars, LeBron and Steph and Giannis and the rest — can feel real but it’s more of an illusion, a sleight-of-hand meant to distract you from another truth:
The NBA kind of sucks.
How dare you!
Yeah, how dare I. How dare I notice the cesspool that is the Dallas Mavericks, and the spritzer of perfume the NBA used to “clean up” the Mavericks’ mess of a loss last week.
Winning, like the NBA playoffs, is an illusion. It’s a distraction, the sheer curtain NBA commissioner Adam Silver and some of his owners hide behind, hoping we’ll be too busy noticing the 38 points Sacramento’s De’Aaron Fox laid on Golden State.
Better to talk about that — it’s fun! — than dwell on what just happened in Dallas, and how that cesspool will impact teams elsewhere.
You know, like the Indiana Pacers.
Mavericks threw a game it needed to win
Here’s what the Dallas Mavericks did, in case you didn’t notice or, more likely, have already forgotten because DID YOU SEE THAT SHOT BY STEPH?
The Mavericks threw a game. They Chicago Black Sox’d their 81st (and 82nd) game of the regular season. Threw it. Tried to lose.
The players on the court? No, not them, which is where this idea of “tanking” — of taking a dive — gets complicated. The Mavericks who dressed out April 7 against Chicago, the Mavericks who got onto the court, tried to make their shots and complete their passes and play defense to the best of their ability. We all know that. They weren’t trying to lose.
But the brain trust of the Mavericks, starting with owner Mark Cuban while also including general manager Nico Harrison, didn’t want to win that game. So they attached nearly 1,000 pounds of dead weight — the bodies of superstars Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving, plus regulars Christian Wood and Josh Green — to the team’s ankles before throwing it onto the court.
Where Dallas drowned.
That one game, that one loss for the Mavericks, was the difference in making the NBA play-in tournament, where anything can happen, or the 2023 NBA draft lottery. For more than 100 years Shoeless Joe Jackson has been unfairly labeled a scoundrel, a flopper, the worst kind of cheater — someone who tried to lose the 1919 World Series. Jackson didn’t try to do any such thing, but never mind. The baseball commissioner at the time, a nasty man named Kennesaw Mountain Landis, had his narrative and stuck by it.
Meanwhile, the Mavs ownership did exactly what Joe Jackson was accused of doing 104 years earlier: They tried to lose.
Now, throwing a game isn’t as easy as it sounds. Those 1919 Black Sox, with several players admitting to receiving money from gamblers, weren’t all in on the scheme. Losing that best-of-nine World Series took eight games, because some people on the team were trying to win. Joe Jackson, for example. He admitted to receiving $5,000 from gamblers, but somewhere between the greenbacks and the games he had a change of heart. Jackson led all players, on both teams, with a .375 average and one home run. (There is talk that Jackson was cheating anyway, that he did his damage in games that were already decided. Think what you want.)
Point being, not everyone in a tank has to be involved in a tank. It happened in 1919 in Chicago. And it happened in 2023 in Dallas, where the Mavericks were playing at home against a Chicago Bulls team that just barely qualified for the playoffs. But the Bulls were in, and they were locked into the 10th seed in the Eastern Conference, so Chicago gave the night off — legitimate rest — to stars DeMar DeRozan and Zach LaVine.
Any idea how hard it would be, for the Mavericks — playing at home, with Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving on the court — to lose that game? Awfully hard.
Unless.
Unless the Mavericks played Doncic just one quarter, enough to get credited for a game but not enough to actually win the thing. Unless Wood, among team leaders in scoring, rebounding, blocks and shooting, was held out for “rest.” Unless Green, one of the team’s best shooters, also was held out for “rest.” Rest for what? For the 2023 NBA playoffs, silly!
The playoffs the Mavericks would reach only if they beat the Bulls.
As for Irving, he was held out just because. Meaning, just because the Mavericks wanted to lose.
What does this have to do with us here in Indiana? Don’t blame yourself, if you don’t know. The NBA is full of shiny objec—DID YOU SEE WHAT DONOVAN MITCHELL JUST DID!
Meanwhile, Pacers won game they needed to lose
The Pacers, those goofballs, won their 82nd game of the season. Doesn’t mean a lot in the record book — the Pacers beat New York to finish 35-47, not 34-48 — but that one win changed a lot.
By beating the Knicks, in Madison Square Garden, the Pacers dropped two spots in the 2023 NBA draft lottery. They went from possibly having the sixth-best odds at the No. 1 overall pick (7-4 French sensation Victor Wembanyama) to the eighth-best odds.
Doyel in preseason: Pacers might be too good to "tank" for Wembanyama
To recap: The Mavericks, with an active roster so bad it lost its 82nd game two days later, also at home, to the 22-60 San Antonio Spurs by 21 points, threw their 81st game of the season against Chicago — with league-wide postseason ramifications — to avoid the playoffs and get into the lottery. The Pacers, meanwhile, won their last game, which had zero postseason impact, and was rewarded by dropping two spots in the lottery.
The Pacers, again, have the eighth-best odds at the top pick. The Mavericks aren’t far behind, at No. 10. After that loss to the Bulls, Dallas coach Jason Kidd admitted he wasn’t part of the scheme to lose.
“Organizational decision,” he told reporters in Dallas. “Those are decisions made from my bosses, and we’ve got to follow them.”
This is not OK, so here’s what NBA commissioner Adam Silver did: Fined the Mavericks $750,000.
Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Watch this:
Mark Cuban’s net worth is $5.1 billion. The median U.S. household net worth is $121,000.
To Mark Cuban, $750,000 is the same as $18 to you and me.
Seriously. It’s math, people.
If Adam Silver were serious about his league, and not just being like everyone else and waiting for the playoffs to start, he’d have given the Mavericks a punishment fitting the crime. A bigger fine? No, please. Mark Cuban has Monopoly money, and good for him. He earned it through hard work and genius, and he gives back to the community. Hell, his name is on the communications school at his alma mater — IU, class of 1981 — thanks to a $5 million gift in 2015 to what is now called the Mark Cuban Center for Sports Communications and Technology.
Thanks for that, Mark.
But here’s what the NBA should’ve done to your tanking team: Removed the Mavericks’ Ping-Pong balls from the lottery machine. Spread them around evenly to the other nine franchises that didn’t qualify for play-in games. The Mavericks have two of the most talented offensive players on Earth in Doncic and Irving, but they misread the negative effect Irving would have on winning. Guess they don’t read much in Dallas. Maybe Cuban should make the front office visit his sports communications center.
Because the Mavericks added Irving and lost their way, they quit in the final two games of the season. Threw them, sure as Claude “Lefty” Williams threw three games in the 1919 World Series — the only starting pitcher in baseball history to lose three games in the World Series.
But never mind what the Mavericks did becau—DID YOU SEE WHAT LEBRON JUST DID.”
4/15/2023 3:53 PM