The Phoenix Suns’ owner, Mat Ishbia, recently sat down with Pat McAfee for an interview on his show, where he addressed the NBA’s two most buzzing talking points at the moment: the All-Star weekend and teams purposely losing to get a higher chance of a better draft pick in the lottery (tanking).
He addressed the criticism of tanking in the NBA amid the recent controversy with the Jazz and the Pacers. But he did not directly address a specific team, but the issue overall.
“It’s an embarrassment. It’s horrible. Like, my perspective is that tanking is a loser mentality. Like I’ve never been around anyone. You show me someone who wants to lose or thinks about losing, and I’ll show you a loser. That’s losers.”
“That’s not my stuff. And so I don’t like losing. I don’t want to ever talk about losing. We try to win. And best the draft works if you don’t win. And you don’t have a good team, you get a good pick.”
“But if you purposely trade for players and then don’t play them, trying to lose games, I think it’s bad for the NBA. I think Adam Silver knows it. Organizations know it. It’s got to change. It will change.”
Ishbia further dived into why telling teams to avoid tanking was not a lost cause.
“It’s fixable. And Adam Silver, to his credit, knows it’s a problem. He’s going to fix it. I believe he’ll fix it. But you can’t have teams like when you say they’re tanking. It’s one thing if you trade players and you’re not a good team.”
“And I’m not sure. I mean, Oklahoma City, if you correct me if I’m wrong, I think they have only one player drafted over number nine, Chet Holmgren, on their team. Everyone else is later in the draft. And so, let’s not discredit them. They built it. They did a good job. Give them some credit.”
“It’s not. They have the first pick three years in a row, and that’s how they became a great team. And so I think purposely losing in anything is the loser mentality. I can’t stand for it. I don’t agree with it. And I think the other organizations realize it.”
“But right now, the problem is that the incentives are misaligned. If you purposely lose, you get better players in the future. You have a better chance. And that’s just not how I was brought up,” concluded the Suns’ owner.
Lottery teams like the Kings, the Pacers, and the Jazz have thus come under a lot of scrutiny as NBA commissioner Adam Silver seeks to curb the tanking problem.
As the host of next season’s All-Star game, the Suns’ owner has come into the spotlight for his opinions on the All-Star weekend. Subsequently, he announced on the show that he is giving $1 million donations to the league specifically for the winner of the NBA’s Dunk contest and the three-point contest on the All-Star weekend.
This adds another layer to the debate on whether players who already earn millions of dollars each year should be given more to perform. But it definitely adds an incentive for two-way players and other role players to step up and outperform the star players in the dunk contest as well.
Even in the modern era, players like Aaron Gordon and Zach LaVine have used the dunk contest to showcase their unreal athleticism and ended up cementing themselves in the public’s memory after headlining the 2016 event.
While that was already an incentive for role players to showcase their athleticism, Ishbia has now also added a competitive incentive to the picture in hopes of making the contest a lot more entertaining and incentivizing star players to potentially also perform.
Do you think such an incentive will make the players prepare much better for the Slam Dunk contest? And would it incentivize stars who are already earning millions to risk injury and participate in the event? Let us know what you think in the comments section.
