It was the night before the NBA Draft, and all through the land, every NBA team was drooling, especially Jazz fans. A season’s worth of losing would bring them back from the dead, with visions of drafting Parker or Wiggins dancing in their heads.
For Jazz fans, Christmas won’t come in December, but in June when the NBA Draft will surely reward a season of lost games in hopes of drafting a future star like Jabari Parker of Duke or Andrew Wiggins of Kansas. However, this type of losing-to-win strategy does bring a certain moral dilemma to the table that can’t be completely ignored.
There are some who say that purposely fielding a team to lose as many games as possible to gain a higher draft pick is playing with a moral fire. Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski was quoted as saying “As an American, I wouldn’t like to think that an American team would want to lose or create situations where you would want to lose. I can’t even fathom — I can’t go there. I can’t believe that that would happen. Maybe I’m naïve and I’m going to go read a fairy tale after this.”
While I normally wouldn’t want to disagree with the great blue devil himself, the fact of the matter is that Krzyzewski doesn’t need to go read a fairy tale because he has been living one. As a college coach Krzyzewski has been living in a fantasy world of the college environment constructed by ethics and accountability. But in the real world the only accountability anyone cares about is the bottom line. Krzyzewski has benefited from coaching for one of the most storied basketball programs in the country that attracts top recruits the way Black Friday draws shoppers.
In the real world teams like the Utah Jazz attract top free agents like a dentist attracts trick-or-treaters on Halloween. Talk about slim pickings. So the fact the Jazz are choosing to put a team full of rookies and washed-up veterans out on the floor in hopes of a losing season is the best option they have. The Jazz are simply playing the hand they have been dealt in hopes of hitting it big in the draft this June, which is a strategy that has been used before. It certainly worked for the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs when they parlayed losing seasons into Patrick Ewing and Tim Duncan and completely revitalized their franchises.
This is why Krzyewski couldn’t be more wrong about it being un-American to employ the losing-to-win strategy, because it’s the opposite. Losing to win is as American as apple pie and can end up tasting twice as nice. The act of being disingenuous about our intentions and purposely not giving our best effort is a method that runs rampant. College students use this skill all the time when asking an attractive classmate to study with them for a math test, when in actuality it’s a ruse to study human anatomy. Apple puts out a new iPhone every year with minimal improvements, clearly not their best effort, because they know consumers will buy the phone anyway, and they can keep staggering their technology for profit.
The Jazz brass would never admit they have purposely put together a team with the intention of having them lose enough games to gain a higher draft position, but it’s rather obvious. After letting their top scorers Paul Millsap and Al Jefferson, along with their starting backcourt Mo Williams and Randy Foye, walk in free agency, the Jazz made it clear they were rebuilding. However they also made it clear they were planning on tanking the season when they drafted rookie point guard Trey Burke and then signed John Lucas III, a career backup who can’t really shoot and doesn’t play defence to mentor him.
How else can you explain the fact that when Burke went down with an injury they resigned their backup point guard from the previous year, Jamaal Tinsley and then replaced him with a guy who last played in the Developmental League?
In a perfect world of full disclosure, the explanation from the Jazz would be as simple as a rhyme. When faced with adversity and a bleak future, we lose all our games and convince our fans it’s a treat. They still fill the arenas with false hope and good cheer — like all good Americans, they hope for next year. Life isn’t a fairy tale, no matter what they say, and we trust in the future because losing will pay.