There is WNBA news today. The Native American tribe that owned the Connecticut Sun – – along with the Mohegan Sun casino – – sold the WNB A franchise to Tilman Firtitta who is the current US Ambassador to Italy and who also owns the NBA’s Houston Rockets. The sales price was $300M and Firtitta is expected to move the team to Houston in 2027 and re-name it as the Houston Comets. Meanwhile, the team will play out the 2026 season in Uncasville, CT.
That price tag of $300M is the highest amount ever paid for a WNBA franchise; the two new expansion teams that will enter the WNBA later this decade only paid $200M as their “entry fee”. The tribe had a higher big of $325M from a minority owner of the Boston Celtics who planned to move the team to Boston, but the league evidently nixed the deal because it “preferred” having the team play in Houston instead of Boston. No, I don’t know why that was the case; but according to multiple reports, that is what happened.
In other basketball news, the NBA reportedly is considering three “proposals” to eliminate – or at least minimize – tanking teams. Please note that a league that continues to permit tanking loses any claim on the moral high ground when the phrase “integrity of the games” comes forth. And in the NBA now, tanking is more common than fighting for advantageous playoff positioning.
There will be ten teams in this year’s Draft Lottery; there is absolutely no doubt which ten teams that will be; the Lottery participants have all seen to it that they cannot be excluded. I could probably make a strong case in favor of at least eight of those teams as “intentional tankers” so if I were looking for an adjective to describe the current “tanking environment” I would probably say that the practice was “rampant”.
The proposal that seems to get the most attention for now would be to expand the Lottery to include the ten teams that do not make the playoffs PLUS the eight teams that take part in the play-in round of the playoffs. That would almost double the number of teams seeking high picks theoretically diminishing the incentive to lose regular season games. While that is mathematically the case, I think such a system would simply relocate the tanking line. Teams would be incentivized to finish below sixth place in their conference rather than fifth or sixth place because a Lottery seat would accrue to teams finishing seventh and below.
There is a theoretical solution to the problem, but I doubt it could be implemented. Tanking is sort of like pornography; Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said:
“I shall not today attempt further to define… ‘hard‑core pornography’… But I know it when I see it.”
Trying to define tanking is a fool’s errand, but fans and Commissioner Adam Silver know it when they see it on the court in regular season games. So, if the Commish had the cojones once or maybe twice to strip a “tanking team” of its draft pick for a year, tanking would screech to a halt. Maybe if David Stern were still exchanging oxygen in the biosphere, such a situation might happen …
Meanwhile, Mark Cuban has offered an idea to pump up the interest in regular season NBA games. Rather than shorten the season to make individual games more meaningful, Cuban suggests shortening NBA games from 48 minute to 40 minutes. He points out correctly that games of 40 minutes duration are the norm in college, in women’s basketball, in FIBA games and in the Olympics; ergo why 48 minutes in the NBA?
His reasoning is that with fewer minutes to be played, there will be less need for “load management” by teams in the regular season. Cutting 8 minutes off regulation time would save almost 10,000 minutes of action and until you think about it closely, that should mean fewer rest breaks for star players. Let me channel Hamlet here:
“Aye, there’s the rub …”
No player in the NBA is averaging as many as 40 minutes per game; Tyrese Maxey leads the league with 38,3 minutes per game. Let me randomly pick three NBA stars here:
- Kevin Durant plays 36.5 minutes per game
- Luka Doncic plays 36.0 minutes per game
- Anthony Edwards plays 35.5 minutes per game
Why would a coach reduce their playing time significantly if the game were shortened to 40 minutes? Would it not be a “winning strategy” to have a teams “best players” on the court for almost the entire game – – which would not cause any change in their “scheduling”? The impact of Cuban’s proposal seems to me to be on the sixth and seventh man on each team who will see fewer minutes and then on the eighth and ninth man who might not see the floor more than two or three times a month.
Finally, this from Maya Angelou:
“There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………