Despite a 26-point victory over the Suns yesterday, the No. 2 seed in the West, the Spurs were fined $25K by the NBA for resting three nominally available players in the contest, including DeMar DeRozan, as Tom Orsborn of the San Antonio Express-News details.
In a press release, the league said that it was penalizing San Antonio for sitting DeRozan, starting center Jakob Poeltl, and key reserve guard Patty Mills during “the same road game.” Orsborn tweets that San Antonio sat Mills and point guard Dejounte Murray against the Cavaliers last month without a similar financial ding from the league.
Orbsorn notes that the Spurs were playing on the second night of a back-to-back, and have been struggling through a brutal second-half schedule for the 2020/21 season, where they will have played 40 games in 68 days.
Given the impressive nature of the victory and recent outcry over an unusually compressed season schedule this year, the league’s punitive decision here is interesting. The Spurs beat a healthy Phoenix team. The Suns’ All-Star back court of Chris Paul and Devin Booker scored a combined 21 points on 9-of-28 shooting from the field.
At 27-28, the Spurs are clinging to the No. 10 seed in the West by 2.5 games over the Pelicans as of this writing. The Suns are 40-16, 1.5 games behind the top-seeded Jazz.
The Raptors were also fined $25K this weekend for violating the NBA’s policies on rest and injury reporting.
The league needs to make sure the top West teams lose so lebum can come back and get some ground in the standings.
25k to the spurs is like me dropping 4 bucks on well vodka. Point being, I drink well vodka.
Cheers from a well vodka brother!
Curtis Rowe likes cheap Vodka.
Curtis Loew likes cheap wine.
effing a, curtis is the best poster around
Careful, RCT…
DNP: Old
Silver needs to stop crying.
Kinda weird they go after the Spurs of all teams..
They just targeted the raptors this past week. They don’t have a vendetta against the spurs, they definitely have something against the raps!
Tanking is unstoppable
If I were a reporter, I’d post daily “tank power ranking” to stop tank
If a team leads 20 points at 3rd quarter and lose the game because they rest the good players at 4th
They won the tank power ranking
I think you have a pretty good shot at being a reporter. Don’t give up bro.
Why aren’t CLE or OKC or DET fined for shutting down Drummond, Horford, and Griffin, respectively? They were all able bodied. Just rotate the draft like the all star game so each team gets the #1 pick every 30 years. No reason to tank.
I agree with your original statement. Although instead of just having a random assigned draft choice, I would invert the lottery rankings instead. Give the best chance at the #1 to the team with the best record that misses the playoffs. They are the teams that deserve the best new players and those best new players would have a much better chance at appearing in the playoffs their rookie year that way. Instead the worst teams get them and NBA fans have to wait 3-4 years for teams with high picks to rebuild enough to make the playoffs. Let the worst teams develop those mid first round picks. They aren’t trying to win anyway, so you might as well use them as development teams.
That would end tanking forever and also make every single win very important for EVERY team at the end of the season.
Hiflew- You would just have the 10 seed tanking to 11 then or 8 to 9 in a typical year – Might be worse in the end
They already did a great job scaling back the lottery ball odds back a couple years ago. This is one of those things I look at as “It will never be perfect”
I doubt that would happen. Plus it is a lot harder to hit the 9 seed or the 11 seed exactly than to be the worst in the league. Trying to tank for the 9 means you would still have to win quite a few games. That means you couldn’t just trade everyone away for draft picks or send one of your best players home with half the season left to play. In no way would it be worse that way.
Could it mean a team tries to lose its last game of the year? Possibly, but that is lot better than a team trying to lose every game.
If you are Oladipo, you don’t play
It’s okay
If you are Wiggins, you don’t play
You are tanking
If you are OK City and you park Al Horford for the last two months of the season because he’s playing too well (whoops, I mean to give your young players more playing time), you’re???
Its just dumb to fine teams for resting their players anyway, but especially this season.
Meanwhile, a fully healthy Al Horford is resting comfortably at home while OKC plays little more than a glorified G League roster.
Seems fair.
Maybe they’ll wait until end of the season and fine them a draft pick lol that’d be hilarious
This has nothing to do with tanking. Spurs schedule has been brutal and the results speak for themselves. Pretty ridiculous for the league to fine teams, even $25,000 when they’ve been losing $50 to $100 million per year for two years because of COVID.