While I recognize team sports and individual sports (eg tennis, where tanking happens quite often) are quite different, an individual on a team is still an individual. And while I still think it's a huge stretch to think the defensive team didn't try as hard because their coached pissed him off, I don't think it's as huge of stretch to imagine an individual (or two, or three) didn't give full effort for any number of reasons. Said more simply, if you change "they" to "he" in your sentence, I wouldn't have that hard of a time believing it.
I'm not going to pretend that I re-watched this travesty of a game and can point to specific plays, or players, where I noticed this. It was more of a general comment, that tanking does indeed happen on an individual level and obviously has a terrible negative effect on the rest of the team.
edit: just seeing a headline about Kyrie blaming Giannis for his ankle injury reminds me of the not so fond time where Kyrie tanked the celtics attempting to guard Giannis in the playoffs, as one example of the above.
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