Welcome on back to BASKETBALLWEATHER. Thanks to the newbies and to the regulars. I so appreciate having y’all here. It’s been a busy week in the NBA, with the Houston Rockets gunning on the Warriors, Draymond getting ejected, the Lakers on a little hot streak, and questions around the Boston Celtics starting to creep in for real, now that it’s almost playoff time. It’s going to be impeccable this year, and I can’t wait for mid-April. Happy Spring.
IF this was a movie it would be one hell of a plot. A player from a small European country, France, the likes of which has never been seen before, is about to emerge into a Company that has billions and billions of dollars at stake, and feeds off of the success, and especially the star power, of its biggest names. Although there’s no such thing as a sure thing, this is the closest thing to the next Michael Jordan that you’re going to get, and everyone, from Vladimir Putin to Nike knows it. It’s just about a near-guarantee.
There’s just one problem.
THE L0TTERY
That pesky little ball-dependent tool that the NBA has been using ever since its inception to keep the game fair for all of its teams. Despite this mechanism of fairness, several of those teams have been shit for a very long time, and are almost always in the running for the best odds in the lottery, aka drafting the best players.
Others are decorated winners who rarely have a shot at landing a lottery ball, who lure players by the promise of sunshine and/or culture. And then there are some, like the San Antonio Spurs, who have the decorated past, but have fallen to the bottom over the last few years because of circumstance and poor decision making.
They’re not a flashy team like the Los Angeles Lakers or the New York Knicks, but they’re just as flossy and sexy when they’re winning, and oh, they happen to have the best coach on the planet who has a history of working with players who fit right into the mold of that 7.5 foot tall superstar from that small European country.
I know, it sounds crazy that the NBA would fix the odds of the lottery balls to plant Wembanyama on the Spurs to ensure his success and therefore the success of the league for the next 20 years as a result, especially since we know how ethical the NBA has been over these last couple of years, let’s say, from the pandemic on.
It’s not like they kept the lights on during the pandemic, or have made specious decisions around players involved in assault and battery charges, or even gotten their hands dirty in the world of suspect sports gambling.
If one of these things were true, probably nothing to blink at, but we don’t have to ever worry about all three of those things being true, so who would ever be unwise enough to think it was possible for the NBA to fix the odds to ensure their future was solvent for years and years to come. It’s utterly ridiculous.
But then, just for fun-sies, because why not, I posted the question on my Reddit account, to see what others might think of it. Surely, they would see right through my satirical knee-slapping and laugh me right out of the room.
Except here are some of the comments I got:
This was by no means the one and only reply. Plenty of users refuted the premise outright. But there were a surprising amount of people on Reddit who actually thought this was possible.
Having a conspiracy theory today is not some phenomenon, but to see it play out in the NBA in such a way, with a significant amount of people genuinely believing it happened, or was possible, does point to some depressing things about the state of the sport.
It’s a point I’ve been circling, but feels more prevalent as every day there seems to be some new “story” popping up in the NBA.
If it’s not gambling, it’s that weird thing the league lied about with the refs calling games tighter after the All Star Break, reported at length on Substack via Tom
, and others. More and more the NBA is starting to feel like the WWE, a league fabricated for entertainment purposes first and foremost, as opposed to a competitive league that happens to be enormously entertaining as a by-product.That’s not an optics problem.
When entertainment becomes the driving force of a professional sports league, corruption.
The game has already been diluted, in particular in the regular season, with player injuries, plastic fouls, and whathaveyou, that there are real questions to be asked about its purity.
When ratings slide, new revenue streams need to be generated, and you get to a point where spurious online sports gambling partnerships are needed to fill in for the missing revenue, and who knows what else...
Thirsty for money, the NBA does whatever it needs to do to make it, losing sight of the competitive nature of the sport, and what makes it entertaining to watch in the first place.
How many fans, outside of the media who feeds off the soap opera, would like a shortened season with a focus on the play-offs?
Who wouldn’t like to axe grinding mid-game pauses for replays?
All of this, by the way, is coming out of my mouth, an NBA lover who can’t get enough of the game (or the soap opera), but it’s precisely because I love the game as much as I do that I worry about what direction it’s going in.
Did the NBA rig Wembanyama to the Spurs? Probably not, but would I bet my life on it?
Would you?
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Like the French, I surrender any opinion about the lottery that might cause the NBA to put a target on my back🤐