Author: Marcus Hayes

NBA commissioner Adam Silver last week fined the Utah Jazz $500,000 for tanking. He fined the Indiana Pacers $100,000 for doing the same.

The Jazz paid Lauri Markkanen more than $500,000 for each of the games in which he was benched to ensure losses. The Pacers paid Pascal Siakam more than five times their fine for sitting him on Feb. 3. The teams literally paid the players more than the fines to not play. The fines were nothing more than performative outrage. The fines were a joke.

The NBA is fast becoming a joke.

For years, the NBA has faced the existential threat of dwindling interest because its uninteresting product is infected with the simultaneous practices of tanking, losing on purpose to secure a better draft position; and load management, not playing available players to better ensure their availability in the postseason. The Sixers have been on the vanguard of both of these reprehensible movements; first, by instituting “The Process” 13 years ago, and then by coddling premier players like current centerpiece Joel Embiid.

Load management might never go away. After all, it kept Kawhi Leonard viable for the Raptors’ 2019 title run, and it’s keeping LeBron James viable at the age of 65, or however old he is (he’s now up to 41).

Tanking? That’s another story. The NBA could fix that in a hot minute if it wanted to. It is a blight on the sport, a fraud perpetrated on fans, media partners, and sponsors on a nightly basis, all brazenly executed, and with no real penalty.

It is a league descending into fringe status, one without a universally likable face this century besides, at its very beginning, Michael Jordan, and even he turned out to be kind of a jerk.

Silver said at his All-Star Game press conference Saturday, “There is talk about every possible remedy now to stop this behavior.”

There is a simple remedy to stop this behavior: Kick the cheaters out of the lottery and replace them with honestly mediocre teams.

This penalizes the egregious tankers, but still gives them a reasonable chance to improve despite their crimes against basketball. It rewards non-tankers who played just well enough to miss the lottery.

This is not the only solution.

One thought: Silver could fine teams even more. ESPN’s Kendrick Perkins suggested $5 million per infraction.

The problem: That’s still chump change. The Pacers owners have a combined net worth of about $16 billion; co-owner Steven Rales spends $5 million on biotech research and development every day.

Another idea: The NBA could abolish the draft entirely. On Monday, David Aldridge of The Athletic wrote exhaustively about such a proposal.

The problems:

Teams that play in states without a state income tax, such Florida’s Heat and Magic and Texas’ Mavericks, Spurs, and Rockets, would have a significant financial advantage in attracting young talent. Similarly, big-market teams in Los Angeles and New York would attract big-endorsement players, whose endorsers would make it worth their while to be a Laker or a Knick.

Ask any 19-year-old kid if he’d rather stay warm with the Heat and make more after-tax money, play for the Clippers in the epicenter of hedonism, or spend six months in frigid, turgid Milwaukee?

The better solution:

If you get caught tanking in the manner of the Sixers from 2013-16, when they won a total of 47 games in three seasons, then you lose your place in the lottery. Your chance at the top-tier players of the best draft in eight years — gone.

In the NBA draft, the top 14 draft slots are lottery slots. That means teams with those picks have a chance for the No. 1 overall pick. Generally speaking, the worst teams have the best chances at the higher picks.

If a team is found guilty of tanking, they’re out of the lottery. They move to the 15th slot in the draft, and the 15th team moves into 14th and therefore into the lottery.

If a team has two lottery slots in the draft, their higher-slotted pick gets moved down.

If a team is found guilty of tanking twice in the same season, they move from 15th to last, or 30th, and the other 15 non-lottery teams move up one slot.

If a team has two lottery slots in the draft and is found guilty of tanking twice in the same season, that lottery slot is moved to 15th, which bumps their previous lottery slot from 15th to 16th, and it bumps the team with the original 16th slot into 14th, the team with the original 15th slot to 13th, etc.

It might sound complicated but it’s not. You violate the spirit of the process (delicious usage there), you lose your privilege. It’s not as draconian as it might be.

You still get to draft, and thereby get a little better.

Unless you’re an idiot and offend repeatedly, you still get to draft at a decent spot. Tyrese Maxey, Siakam, Jarrett Allen, and Jalen Brunson all were drafted 16th or lower.

Then again, so were Wade Baldwin, Justin Patton, and, of course, former Sixers prospect Zhaire Smith.

That should be enough to scare off any would-be tankers.

Last week, with the trade deadline looming, Joel Embiid made a public plea to the 76ers’ front office. He begged them to ignore the luxury tax for once, and to get him the help he needs for what has turned into an unlikely impending playoff run.

“In the past we’ve been, I guess, ducking the tax,” Embiid said last week. “So, hopefully, we think about improving. Because I think we have a chance.”

Embiid made this plea knowing that Tyrese Maxey, VJ Edgecombe, and Embiid himself cannot sustain their high level of play if they have to maintain such a high number of minutes.

Embiid’s plea coincided with the 25-game drug suspension of fellow veteran and max-salary player Paul George, who, like Embiid, was rounding into form after more than a year of debilitating injury issues. George will not be eligible to return until only 10 games remain in the season.

Embiid’s wishes made sense.

Embiid’s wishes were not granted.

In fact, not only did the Sixers fail to make a significant move to improve the roster, they actually got worse: They traded last year‘s first-round pick, sharpshooter Jared McCain, for future draft picks.

So, despite asking, and asking nicely, Embiid got no help.

Daryl Morey’s message to Embiid:

Trust the process.

“I think we all wanted to add to the team, and, you know, we took his comments to heart,” the Sixers’ president said Friday.

And?

“We were trying to add to the team,” Morey said, “and we didn’t find a deal that made sense — one that we thought could move the needle on our ability to win this year.”

So: Still processing.

McCain trade

Maxey is the team’s most important player, so he was never a trade consideration, but Morey acknowledged that both Edgecombe and Embiid were essentially untouchable, too.

McCain was not untouchable. His departure provided salary-cap relief. Further, though, Morey painted McCain as a long-term project who might not develop faster than whomever the Sixers draft in June with the first-round pick the Sixers got in the trade.

That seemed harsh. True, but harsh.

As a rookie, McCain averaged 15.3 points in 23 games mostly as a bench player last season, which was cut short by injury. More injury issues limited his participation this season, and he was averaging just 6.6 points. Morey traded him Wednesday to Oklahoma City for the Thunder’s first-round pick in June, as well as three future second-round picks.

McCain simply was not in the Sixers’ immediate plans, and Morey insisted that they would not have gotten a better return on McCain in the offseason.

Morey also said the Sixers hoped to immediately flip some of the draft picks they received in the McCain deal and improve the team thus.

There were no upgrades out there.

The emergence of Dominic Barlow, who is starting in place of George, and the continued strong bench play of guard Quentin Grimes convinced him that there were no players available for a sensible asking price that would appreciably improve the Sixers.

Certainly, there were no players that would have warranted the Sixers exceeding the luxury tax, though Sixers ownership had given him permission to spend whatever he needed to spend.

“If we had found an [addition] and we were going to end up higher [than the tax], we would have ended up above it. We’ve done it several times,” Morey said. “We didn’t see something that did.”

So: Still processing.

The Process

The catastrophic, scorched-earth strategy of rebuilding the Sixers, begun in 2013, eventually became known as “The Process.” Trusting in it became the mantra of both the franchise and a cult of devoted, long-suffering fans for whom no sacrifice was too outrageous.

Embiid then hijacked the phrase as his nickname in 2016, after he’d missed his first two NBA seasons due to injury. Personalizing the phrase was an ostentatious act, but, considering the nature of his turbulent career, Embiid has come to embody it.

Now, 13 years and five decision-makers later — Sam Hinkie, Bryan Colangelo, Brett Brown, Elton Brand, and Morey — the Sixers must ask their best player, the last vestige of The Process, to spend one of his twilight seasons hoping the current chapter of The Process has a happy ending.

“This team, we think, can make a deep playoff run and is one of the top few teams in the East,” Morey said.

He’s right.

The Process has a window. It’s a small window, like that triangular side window on old cars, but it’s a window nevertheless.

The Least of the East

As of Friday night the Sixers stood sixth in a sagging Eastern Conference. Injury has diminished both the Celtics, who won the NBA title two years ago, and the Pacers, conference champs last season. The Pistons are in first place, 4½ games ahead of the flawed Knicks and Celtics, but nobody really believes in them. The Sixers are just one game behind the Raptors, who have five players averaging double figures, and 1½ games behind the Cavaliers, who, despite having won seven of their last eight games, were so desperate that they traded for — wait for it — 36-year-old James Harden.

As predicted when Celtics star Jayson Tatum and Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton suffered severe injuries in the 2025 playoffs, the East is weak and vulnerable. These are adjectives that often have been used to describe the 76ers during The Process.

Now, though, the Sixers have won five of their last six games. They’ve ridden Maxey’s MVP campaign, Edgecombe’s Rookie of the Year campaign, and what would be Embiid’s Comeback Player of the Year campaign if the NBA had such an award.

Can they keep it up? We won’t know for months whether the conference is so bad that even the Sixers can win it.

So, until then: Still processing.

You gotta believe

“I believe in myself, so I’m always going to believe I have a chance, as long as I’m healthy,” Embiid told reporters Thursday night, after McCain had arrived in Oklahoma and no new player had joined the Sixers on the road in Los Angeles. “I believe that we can beat anybody. We hold down the fort until [George] comes back. He’s really needed. He’s irreplaceable.”

He’s not in demand, though. League sources indicated that no team was interested in trading for George. No surprise there. At 35, not only is George suspended, but he is also owed almost $110 million over the next two seasons, and he has an injury history as bad as Embiid’s.

That’s OK with the Sixers. George, when not taking banned substances, is probably still very good. Morey adores George, especially as a defensive difference-maker.

“We really like what Paul gives us,” Morey said.

Well, he won’t give them anything for the next 21 games. Which, for the moment, is exactly what the Sixers will get from the 2026 trade deadline.

Process that.