NBA fines Dončić's Dallas Mavericks $750,000 for letting them win

The NBA has announced this Friday through a statement that it has imposed a fine of $750,000 (about 675,000 euros) on the Dallas Mavericks for letting them win against the Chicago Bulls in the game on April 7.

The US professional basketball championship says the fine for Luka Dončić's team is “for conduct detrimental to the league”.

"The Mavericks violated the league's player rest policy and demonstrated through actions and public statements the organization's desire to forfeit the game to improve their chances of retaining their first-round pick in the 2023 NBA draft

.

, the NBA said in its statement.

Luka Dončić played just over a quarter of the game on the night the Dallas club paid tribute to his country of Slovenia.

He shared the bench with Kyrie Irving, the other great star of the team, who did not participate in the entire game, while the Mavericks were losing the season.

Tim Hardaway, Maxi Kleber, Josh Green and Christian Wood were also left out.

Actually, they already had a very difficult time qualifying for the playoffs.

"The Dallas Mavericks' decision to restrict key players from full participation in an elimination game last Friday against Chicago undermined the integrity of our game," said Joe Dumars, NBA Executive Vice President, Chief of Basketball Operations.

"The actions of the Mavericks failed our fans and our league."

Plenty of other teams have given the impression they'd rather lose their last few games and have sidelined their stars citing suspicious injuries or other excuses, but no one has done it as botched as the Mavericks.

The NBA's mention of "public statements" refers to the fact that the team's coach, Jason Kidd, made it clear before the game that he was going to sit his best players and that it was not his decision, but "the organization's" .

In addition, he insisted in the press conference after the game: "This is perhaps a step backwards, but we hope it will lead us to move forward... These are decisions that are made by my bosses and we have to follow them and we trust that [the owner Mark] Cuban and Nico [Harrison, the general manager,

The league, however, has not reached the conclusion that the players who participated in the game were not playing to win, despite the fact that Dallas squandered an 11-point lead in the fourth quarter and ended up losing 112-115. , in a collapse that accentuated suspicions.

A common practice

Every year, at the end of the season, the NBA teams choose the new players for the league with a system that gives priority to the lowest ranked.

Dropping down on the table to have more options to choose a future star is an NBA classic, known as

The league has tried unsuccessfully to reform the system to avoid that pitiful spectacle of teams surreptitiously celebrating their losses.

In the next draft, the big favorite is the mighty French center Victor Wembanyama, 2.20 meters tall and 19 years old, whom many see as capable of marking a generation.

Wembanyama's claim seems to have heightened the interest of teams to improve their odds.

In the case of the Mavericks, it is also added that due to an old agreement with the Knicks, they have transferred their first-round player in this year's

, unless their team is one of the first 10 to choose.

By losing to Chicago, and then their next game as well, the chances that their team would be protected for that very reason shot up to more than 80%.

In addition, in the position to which they have fallen, they have a 3% chance of being the first to choose and, therefore, of choosing Wembanyama.

In 2017, the current lottery system was established, applied since 2019, which accentuates randomness.

The 14 teams that have been left out of the playoffs enter the hype

The new system evens out the odds so that the bottom three teams in the regular season standings each have a 14% chance of winning the top pick in the lottery.

The fourth from the bottom has 12.5% ​​options;

the fifth, 10.5%;

the sixth, 9%;

seventh, 7.5%... In the structure prior to 2019, the first seed had a 25% chance of winning the lottery;

the second, 19.9% ​​and the third, 15.6%.

The ballots of the rest are distributed according to the positions in the classification.

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