LBS- In the latest edition of his podcast with Bobby Marks, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski spoke about how rampant tanking was across the league during the final weeks of the regular season. According to Woj, one NBA owner went off on his head coach after his team beat a quality opponent on the road.
“There were teams literally signing G League players, intentionally bringing up guys they knew could not play in the NBA because they were determined to lose games,” Wojnarowski said. “I never heard more talk from front office executives — frustration with coaches who were winning games they didn’t want them to win. And owners, I know of an instance of an owner berating — really berating — his coach here in the last several weeks of the season for going in and beating a pretty good team on the road and going, ‘What are you doing?’” --------- Ah, to be a fly on the wall in a office in which an owner was giving his head coach the business for choosing the worst possible time to actually do his job admirably. I can only imagine a tongue lashing that almost assuredly would read something like "What good are you? You can't even fucking lose right!" if transcribed would have been an absolute hoot to witness live. What I find even more fascinating, however, is the idea that said fly probably would have been buzzing up a goddamn storm on a light fixture in support of ownership if he happened to be a diehard fan of the team whose front office he infiltrated. Forget how you feel about tanking for a second, and focus on the fact that the priorities of the paying customer and franchise proprietor typically line up about as well Kevin Durant's haircut. Remaining adamant in actively creating a losing culture does a lot of things, but it doesn't make for a short term financial gain. Yet, here was this hero, bearing the cross for his dwindling number of clients that continue to purchase $10 beers to make it easier to stomach silently rooting that their shitty, hopeless team experiences the darkest of times to shorten the road to a luminescent future. It took a money man becoming incensed by a head coach that sabotaged his team's self-sabotage (aka won) that he went out of his way to reprimand him, but a billionaire actually managed to become relatable to your average, every day sports fan that ironically despises nothing more than mediocrity. Not exactly the most commendable of common causes, but still one that, if only for one tirade demanding productive counter-productivity, united the long-term aspirations of the top and bottom rung of the organizational hierarchy.
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