People continued to bet on 76ers games during the process though, didn't they? And they bet on tanking teams every season.
Bryan Colangelo Submits Resignation
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I was responding to LS's direct observation that tanking was not an issue in other sports.
As already posted I assume Silver's concern about tanking is related to the integrity of the game issues.
Those poor, benighted line-makers, when will they ever get the break that they so richly deserve?
A point spread can be set to cover a team losing,
However my observation specifically said setting a moneyline for a game where one team was dedicated to losing is problematic.
I think LS is allowed to resent Silver being the tip of the spear, even if its momentum was driven by a bunch of owners' pride.
I just don't think on balance that makes Silver a bad commissioner, much less contemptible. Silver and I would disagree over the amount of damage that tanking teams would do to the league's image and ultimately revenue, should Hinkism bear fruit and thus prove more widely contagious... but Silver's isn't an unreasonable position to take.
And I think we are pretty much in agreement. I just don’t think he deserves to be called a snake or being implicated as having ulterior motives. I think LS is as entitled as any fan would be when loyalties come into to play to cast stones, I just think he’s just been a bit uneven in his posts here lately on his team (we all have our moments) and aiming shade where it doesn’t really belong. Ymmv.
Yeah, pretty much.
I'm very sympathetic to LS here. He and I come at it from a similar point of view: although I don't have his career in the markets, I've been close enough to them and several related fields. As a result, I have a deep and abiding respect for anyone who can take a complex system and find a brilliant way to game it, within the rules, to his own advantage. Hinkie's process was The Big Short, only in sports. Who can't admire the vision and sheer balls it takes to commit to such a contrarian role? So if that was what made him a basketball fan again, I get it. If Pedro Martinez was unceremoniously hounded from the game after 2002 for being, I dunno, too damn good at his job... I might have despaired of baseball fandom too.
I just agree with you that his anger is misplaced.
I'm very sympathetic to LS here. He and I come at it from a similar point of view: although I don't have his career in the markets, I've been close enough to them and several related fields. As a result, I have a deep and abiding respect for anyone who can take a complex system and find a brilliant way to game it, within the rules, to his own advantage. Hinkie's process was The Big Short, only in sports. Who can't admire the vision and sheer balls it takes to commit to such a contrarian role? So if that was what made him a basketball fan again, I get it. If Pedro Martinez was unceremoniously hounded from the game after 2002 for being, I dunno, too damn good at his job... I might have despaired of baseball fandom too.
I just agree with you that his anger is misplaced.
Also, LOL at bricking the phone being evidence of malfeasance. Why on earth would she want private investigators to have unrestricted access to her phone contents, especially if she's already copping to the crime they're investigating?
Yeah you know when you put it like that, it's probably dumb.
But if course the owners don't have to admit it so I guess I have to blame the guy who did it.
The whole thing was bullshit, is basically my main point. And it still pisses me off.
It's the deflategate of my favourite team.
The league screwed the team over for unclear or bad reasons and the public went along as it fit a narrative (tanking is bullshit) that many liked.
Who cares if the sixers lost their GM he deserves it.
How do you guys feel about Goodell again?
So it might not be clearly 100% fair but ... Raaaaaahhhhh f him
I think Silver is a great commish who made a terrible mistake in pushing out Hinkie. Either he led the charge or the owners wanted it and he didn't stand up to them, when he's stood up to them in other instances. Unless there's gross malfeasance or negligence, the league and especially other owners should not get involved in a team's affairs.
Hinkie's main problem was he was open and honest about tanking, while other GMs couch it in plausible deniability or flat don't talk the the press. Everyone knows when teams are tanking but none of those other GMs were pushed out by the league.
Hinkie's main problem was he was open and honest about tanking, while other GMs couch it in plausible deniability or flat don't talk the the press. Everyone knows when teams are tanking but none of those other GMs were pushed out by the league.
I think a pretty significant issue for the Sixers moving forward is that they’ve now made known that Fultz has serious mental health issues. First off, he should sue. Second, the league should punish them severely. Third, his trade value has to be very low now, maybe a late first or so.
Here’s a question - when teams exchange medicals, are they required to reveal mental health history? Or is that protected on a level beyond physical health?
Here’s a question - when teams exchange medicals, are they required to reveal mental health history? Or is that protected on a level beyond physical health?
What legal rights do you think Fultz has? Player contracts must contain broad waivers of HIPAA rights; otherwise, we could never know all that we do about player injuries, and players would effectively enjoy no-trade rights by holding the power to veto sharing of medical information with other clubs. Perhaps player contracts should treat mental-health records differently, but I’d be surprised if they do.
Probably none, but I just wasn’t sure if mental health was excepted, particularly where information is publicly released for no real purpose.
At the risk of re-litigating this, the Hinkie situation was gross malfeasance. The difference between subtle tanking and open/sustained tanking is huge in terms of league credibility. There's a reason nobody had been so brazen before, and it's not because nobody was as clever as Hinkie. Tanking for years at a time is a strategy every 14 year old playing NBA2K in franchise mode comes up with. It's just that it was clearly understood that it would undermine the sport and obviously wouldn't be tolerated.
The Sixers got off easy with just Hinkie being pushed out.
That pretty much sums it up.
The draft, revenue sharing, etc. are essentially league subsidies to promote franchise competitiveness. If you take those subsidies in bad faith (i.e. by sustained tanking) you are naturally going to piss off the people who are paying for them -- all of the other franchises in the league.
I'm guessing that the owners regard tanking as something like speeding. Everyone does it to some extent, but reckless behavior will not be tolerated.
Exactly. And you can bet a week's pay that Hinkie was warned, likely multiple times. The owners talk to Silver, Silver calls Hinkie, Hinkie says "I know, I know" and continues to tank. Hell, Silver probably HAD to whack Hinkie just to maintain credibility with the other owners.
Yes, the strategy was ballsy. Sometimes being ballsy costs you your job.
On the other hand if there's any evidence that Silver forced one or more Colangelo's on Philly, that's something to be pissed about.
Wow. I really like this "Tragedies of the Commons" type take.
This makes his ouster make a ton more sense to me--look at how his behavior affects the, uh, important people. Thanks for this.
True. Hell, you know I'm a big believer in promulgation and all that good shit.
But I've also never had to see, "Don't poke the bear," written anywhere to understand what could happen.
[Disclosure: I'm a known bear poker. It's a problem.]
Gamesmanship may be part of the game between the lines, but one generally has a duty in business to deal fairly and in good faith with one’s partners. The other owners are entitled to police what they deem to be a breach of that duty.
The NBA has a lengthy document detailing the Association, its rules and bylaws, and then hundreds more pages of CBA and other operating rules.
Following all those ought to constitute good faith, no? I mean, lots of other clubs got wins at his expense. They have constructed a game, and invited people to try and win it. Prescribing the 'how' would seem to make a farce of the entire notion of competition.
What the Tampa Bay Rays have been doing is much more blatant profit-taking at the expense of their league partners and the revenue-sharing scheme. Losing a lot, for a while, ought to only be a problem if Sixers ownership thinks it is, as-influenced by the paying customers.
At this point, I assume all the owners meetings in all the major leagues run something like a feudal French court where most, if not all, of the rules are unwritten and matters of subtlety, nuance, wit, and general douche-baggery.
I'm this close to believing they wear wigs.
While I do think there is some credence to your point with regards to the outcome, I think your analogy fails in that the whole Deflategate/Goodell fiasco was a literally made-up “controversy” that the league ran with to punish the Patriots — when the Hinkie fiasco was just a very openly “we’re tanking to get better” strategy that the Sixers were very open and public about — and was perceived by other owners and the league as hurting their credibility and franchise values ultimately. Maybe they were wrong, but I think their intentions were legitimate — versus it is pretty clear at this point that the Deflategate saga was mythology.
According to The Ringer article, one of the burner accounts Tweeted this about Fultz (which I think is the single most offensive Tweet of them all):
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So that's the tweet in which the Sixers made it known that Fultz has "serious mental health issues"? And he should file a lawsuit over it?
Come on.
People being ignorant and dumb about mental health issues is not unusual and it's rarely insightful.
The team was not sure what was going on early and colangelo/ Mrs colangelo I guess.
The injury issue and the doctor and rehab didn't start for some time into the season.
I don't read that as some big insight into Fultz so much as a don't blame me tweet.
The main thing these accounts did was blame someone for everything. Never big collars fault.
That tweet was from February, after he was back shooting with the team after practice.
The suggestion is he’s missing time on the court because of something in his past regarding his family, and he missed almost the entire year. He also blamed physical and mechanical issues, but yeah I’d say there’s plenty about that Tweet suggesting Fultz has mental health issues he’s battling. There had been plenty of speculation about it both now (the yips, body language) and with his injury from college, so if one believes there’s a mental component it’s pretty fair to surmise it’s serious.
Had you heard anything about a family trauma in his life before Collangelo, or “his wife” Tweeted about it? It’s a pretty despicable thing to Tweet, provided he’s basing it on inside knowledge and not making it up as an excuse. Which is no less despicable.
It’s possible he’s making it up or exaggerating to protect his own ego, but the problem is he’s in a position of authority and “in the know,” so when reading something like that it’s pretty easy for one to take it as factual. Like he’s venting on the side about stuff from behind the scenes.
Nobody's defending the tweet. But you said "the Sixers" have now "made it known that Fultz has serious mental health issues," and should sue. First, I don't think that is "known" at all. But let's assume it is actually the case. You want Markelle Fultz to sue his employer because of something the wife of a former GM tweeted suggesting he might be battling mental health issues? Certainly he can't win a defamation suit if it's true. I guess you want him to sue for some kind of privacy violation, which as discussed upthread seems unlikely to succeed since disclosure of medical conditions clearly are permitted under the CBA. I mean, if Fultz couldn't play because of crippling anxiety or depression, I'm guessing the Sixers would be well within their legal rights to come right out and say so. So it's hard to imagine that they'd be found liable for something the organization didn't even authorize.
Whichever Colangelo did this is pretty crappy. But not every misplaced nail needs to be hammered with a lawsuit.
EDIT: I actually have no idea whether leagues or teams have players sign HIPAA waivers, so maybe I'm off base there. But even assuming a HIPAA violation, for a number of reasons, I still don't think suing his employer makes much sense here.
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That's an awful tweet. I wouldn't call that a "mental health" issue, because to me that phrasing implies a diagnosis, but it's a psychological issue. Maybe that's semantics. As for HIPAA, Colangelo and/or his wife aren't health care providers (and we don't even know if this was an issue that required "health care") so not a HIPAA issue I don't think*. But yeah pretty awful on several levels. Implies it's in his head, reveals there's a secret family issue, gross joke.
Glad he and/or his wife are gone.
*There may be something in the contracts about the team revealing heath or personal issues...no clue
Glad he and/or his wife are gone.
*There may be something in the contracts about the team revealing heath or personal issues...no clue
My sue comment was a privacy issue (certainly not defamation), but I’m not entirely sure if he signs that right away. If I could, I would go back in time and clarify a bit more and caveat it with “if he has hasn’t signed away all forms of his expectations of privacy.” I don’t know if mental heath and physical health are treated equally in these contracts.
That also stood out to me as the most offending tweet. Not only because it reveals a private issue but also because I can now imagine there are folks out there digging into this and trying to get the full scoop. There was another tweet mentioning that his trainer was dating his mom took and it wasn’t clear to me whether the two things were connected in same way.
He doesn’t deserve to have his dirty laundry aired like this.
He doesn’t deserve to have his dirty laundry aired like this.
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Don't get me wrong by the way it's totally unacceptable, I'm just not sure it means much more than whoever wrote sucks