TORONTO — Everybody was doing their part to make the situation feel normal.
Toronto Raptors rookie Jamal Shead was running around the perimeter of the Scotiabank Arena court, having just banked home a game-winner as time expired to help his team beat the Washington Wizards on March 8. His teammates chased him around the floor in celebration. The fans roared.
The Wizards hung around, heads low, hoping an official’s review would negate the bucket. When the referees made the call — Shead still had two fingers on the basketball when the clock hit 0:00 — the Wizards leaped in happiness, the Raptors went from thrilled to stunned and the noise went from raucous to a confused murmur.
You would never know that for many committed fans of two teams having long, loss-filled seasons, things were abnormal. Many of those fans hoped the review would deliver their team a loss. For both teams, a loss would have aided their draft lottery ambitions.
The players know those fans exist. Players also understand fans’ logic — to a point.
“It’s bulls—,” Raptors veteran Garrett Temple told The Athletic after the game. “I’m a realist and I can understand the big-picture thinking. But I would never wish for my team to lose a game. I would never wish my players to go out and not compete to win. … As competitors, it’s who we are. I think it’s a situation that with the way the rules are, then there is the incentive to (think like) that. And that’s, in my opinion, wrong.
“I think the league in general, (NBA commissioner) Adam (Silver), the NBA, they have a lot to think about in terms of trying to figure out ways to make it more competitive.”
Welcome to March in the NBA, the least inspiring month on basketball’s calendar. As the NCAA provides the most vitally competitive basketball in its men’s and women’s tournaments, the NBA, aside from a few marquee games, supplies the worst of its product. It’s not that the players on the floor aren’t trying; rather, the league’s best players are frequently not out there. That game was part of a four-game Raptors homestand that included teams whose fans could feasibly all be hoping for losses — the Raptors, Wizards, Jazz and 76ers.
In this case, Shead likely wouldn’t have been in that position if the Raptors weren’t openly de-emphasizing winning. They rested starting point guard Immanuel Quickley and benched the rest of the starters down the stretch. They had done something similar a few nights prior, when Shead’s fellow rookie Ja’Kobe Walter hit a late shot to give the Raptors an improbable win in Orlando.
The Raptors are not alone. There is the incentive for teams such as the Wizards, Jazz, Nets, 76ers, Hornets, Spurs, Trail Blazers and maybe even the Bulls, currently the ninth seed in the East, to lose, which would improve both their draft odds and the floor for their pick. Most of those teams will liberally rest their best players.
At the other end of the standings, the Oklahoma City Thunder, Cleveland Cavaliers and Boston Celtics were essentially locked into their seeds heading into March. Accordingly, some of them have given time off for their best players, as is their right. They have played well enough to earn the chance to prioritize health for the postseason over regular-season wins. And then there are teams with more experienced rosters that will prioritize health over seeding, thus resting players frequently.
If you add all of that to the growing number of teams resting players throughout the season and injuries adding up as the calendar turns, you end up with a diminished product. Sure, this is when playoff teams are trying to hit their strides, which inevitably results in great games between good teams. A lot of those games are on national television.
However, if you dig deeper into each night’s slate of games, you will find lineups peppered by end-of-roster players, players on two-way contracts and ones on 10-day contracts. It is excellent those players get opportunities, and nobody should begrudge them for the way the league is structured.
At the same time, ticket prices, at least on primary markets, don’t go down in March. Fans are often paying to see an inferior product.
“People come to watch the stars play at the end of the day,” said Temple, a 15-year veteran and vice president of the National Basketball Players Association. “If the stars aren’t playing then they’re not necessarily watching the players that they (paid) to watch. The guys that are on the court are playing hard. They’re NBA players, NBA talent. But it’s definitely different than game 10 in the season or playoff game five or something like that in the first round.”
Whether the NBA wants to address it or not, it is a problem.
With 36 points, eight rebounds and seven assists, Portland’s Deni Avdija had a monster night against the Denver Nuggets on March 21. (Troy Wayrynen / Imagn Images)
Last year, Deni Avdija had a breakthrough season, his fourth in the NBA, all with the Wizards. He shot a career-best 56 percent from inside the arc and 37.4 percent from 3. His assist percentage jumped. Per 36 minutes, he averaged 5.2 points and 0.8 assists more than he had in a previous season. He started in all 75 of his appearances.
It was perfect timing for the Wizards, who signed him to a four-year, $55-million rookie extension before his big year. The Wizards bet the 6-foot-9 forward would fulfill his promise to become a quality starter while earning close to the midlevel exception. The wager hit immediately.
Before Avdija played even one game on his new, team-friendly deal, the Wizards traded him to the Portland Trail Blazers in July for Bub Carrington, the 14th pick of the 2024 NBA Draft, the second-most-favorable of the Trail Blazers’, Cetlics’ and Bucks’ 2029 first-rounders, two second-round picks and oft-injured guard Malcolm Brogdon.
“For how young he is, there’s a certain maturity to him,” Portland coach Chauncey Billups said. “He’s very serious about his work. … He just has a seriousness and professionalism about him, and that’s what we needed. And some of our young guys are starting to see that.”
Avdija has been one of the Trail Blazers’ best players, leading them to a genuine season of growth. Avdija is third in points, assists and rebounds per game for Portland, and a leader in advanced stats such as win shares per minute and box plus/minus. The Trail Blazers passed their win total from last year on Feb. 4.
Meanwhile, the Wizards have been the worst team in the league for most of the year, an acceptable outcome given they have also added a young player they liked in Carrington and future picks.
In terms of trade value, the Wizards did fine in exchanging a good player who might top out as a good starter on a nice contract. The Wizards didn’t mind being bad for another full season because that would guarantee another shot at a good draft pick for a comparatively talent-barren team. Meanwhile, the 24-year-old Avdija has helped the Trail Blazers achieve competency, and that will hurt their draft lottery odds in May.
The Wizards are an extreme case, but they have had more company as the season has progressed. The NBA recently fined the Jazz $100,000 for sitting star Lauri Markkanen without cause. The Nets traded away several of their starters after a decent start, while others have manipulated their rosters by now. When a player as good as Cooper Flagg is likely to be available in the draft, all of this was bound to happen given the league’s incentive structure.
The NBA has had some version of a draft lottery since 1985. Before then, a coin flip between the worst team in each conference determined the top pick. In 1985, the seven teams in the lottery had the same chance at the No. 1 pick. From 1986-89, the top three picks were selected at random among non-playoff teams, with all teams having the same odds, and the reverse standings applied from there. (In other words, if the worst team was not selected in the top three, it could pick no lower than fourth.) In 1990, the NBA went to a weighted lottery system, with the worst teams getting the best odds, and the top three spots still at play.
In 2019, the league made its most radical change to the system in nearly 30 years: It randomized the first four picks instead of three and flattened the odds so that the worst three teams had equal 14-percent odds of winning the lottery, with no team having a better than 52.1-percent chance at picking in the top four. That led to the Detroit Pistons, the worst team in the league for two years in a row, picking fifth in three consecutive drafts. (They won the lottery as the league’s second-worst team, in 2021, taking Cade Cunningham.)
When talking to league observers, agents and executives, there is a hope that the flatter odds combined with the new CBA that curbs spending will promote parity and limit the length of time it takes for teams to rebuild, thus curtailing plans like those of the Wizards, Jazz or “The Process”-era 76ers. There is a desire to see how those two elements work in concert.
The NBA has made it clear in its recent collective bargaining agreement negotiations that achieving some sort of leaguewide parity is a priority.
“You’re going to get the best player to a team that’s already won the championship or a playoff team — that’s something I don’t really agree with,” Wizards swingman Khris Middleton said when asked about a hypothetical system that didn’t reward losing. “Sometimes it (would) happen that way. I do think the bottom, lower teams need a little bit of help in the draft.”
Counter: They would need less help if they weren’t incentivized to undercut themselves. If being bad didn’t guarantee a top pick, teams wouldn’t punt on entire seasons, or at least months of seasons.
The 76ers are the clearest example of this right now. They started the season as a fringe championship contender, but their stars’ poor health and production torpedoed their chances. Meanwhile, they will lose their draft pick, owed to Oklahoma City, if it falls outside the top six this year. Depending on whether they finish fifth, sixth or seventh in the reverse standings, they will have a 63.9-, 45.8- or 31.9-percent chance before the lottery of retaining their pick. The Thunder would like that pick, and rested Shai Gilgeous-Alexander while sitting a bevy of other rotation players with injuries in their game against Philadelphia on Wednesday. Alas, the Thunder won by 33.
Related: On March 12, the 76ers played the Raptors, who, because of injuries, personal absences and “rest,” were missing nine of their top 11 players on their roster. The Raptors’ lone available starter, Jakob Poeltl, played only 17 minutes. The Raptors still beat the 76ers by 13.
It brings to mind the 2022-23 Dallas Mavericks resting most of their players at the end of the season, turning down the chance to squeak into the Play-In Tournament and maximizing their odds of keeping their pick. It worked, and Dallas ended up with promising center Dereck Lively II. The Raptors, 76ers and Nets all could have made runs at the Play-In this year, but are openly uninterested.
Many European soccer leagues feature relegation — with the worst teams falling to lower divisions, akin to if the Wizards, Jazz and Hornets were heading to the G League after this year ends. Temple suggested mixing that system with the draft system and making the worst three teams ineligible for the top three picks, and moving them automatically to spots 12, 13 and 14 in the draft. Then, give the 11 other non-playoff teams equal odds at winning the lottery.
A more extreme proposal: Remove all draft-related incentives for losing. If you can’t make winning the goal for every game, at least make sure losing is never the wiser course. Expand the lottery to not just draw for the first four spots, but also the first 22. It can include all non-playoff teams and those that lose in the first round.
Last year, that would have made the Lakers (47-35) and Bucks (49-33) as likely to get a top pick as the Pistons (14-68) and Wizards (15-67). You have to fundamentally be OK with allowing that sort of randomness into the league, and most teams would not, knowing if you cannot sell wins, you at least have to be able to sell hope. Why should some teams be able to sell both and others none?
It’s simple: Fans would be able to count on seeing the best that teams have to offer, barring injuries, throughout a season rather than only at certain points. Fans would not have to decide whether losing was the best thing for the long-term health of their favorite team.
Such a system could limit transactions. It would surely result in even more protections placed on traded draft picks. The league loves how rumors, free agency and trades keep it in the news cycle. There is a basic decision the NBA needs to make here: whether all of that or the games themselves are more important.
On March 7, Jakob Poeltl sat out the Raptors’ game against the Jazz for “rest.” A night later, he played against the Wizards.
“I felt great. But it kind of seemed to me like we were a little bit sluggish in the beginning,” Poeltl said. “I was looking around. I was wondering why we were maybe a step late today. And then I realized, ‘Oh, the rest of my team is on a back-to-back right now.’”
This season, NBA teams average nearly 15 back-to-back sets. In 2014-15, teams averaged more than 19. The league had even fewer than this a few years back before the introduction of the in-season NBA Cup, which necessitates a week with fewer games and, therefore, no back-to-backs.
Those games have to be made up at some point. In general, that happens — you guessed it — later in the season, often in March.
“That’s just more wear and tear on the body with less time to recover,” Wizards guard Marcus Smart said. “Something usually has to give — you don’t add something without subtracting something. But we’ve added without subtracting. We added more wear and tear on the body with the (NBA Cup) and kept back-to-backs. It just don’t make sense.”
“I’m a coach. I’m not running and playing defense,” Raptors coach Darko Rajaković said about the nature of back-to-backs. “And (as a coach) you feel it’s real, how tired you get and you’ve got to really push through it. And then for players, you’ve got to add to that them being injured, trying to play through some minor injuries and all of that. It’s a huge, huge physical and mental toll on them.”
It has become stylish to look at players’ statistics from decades ago and point out how many played 80-plus games, occasionally more than 40 minutes per appearance. There are many reasons that doesn’t happen anymore, with teams and players (and their agents) being extra cautious with their health given the money involved and how important those players are in the playoffs when the games matter the most.
However, the game has fundamentally changed. It is played at a much faster pace. The 2005-06 “07 Seconds or Less” Suns averaged a league-leading 96.92 possessions per game. They would rank 28th this year. In addition, added movement within possessions and increased defensive physicality allowed back into the game since the middle of last season has made minutes more taxing.
Tonight in the NBA:
21 stars playing ✅ | 21 star DNPs ❌ pic.twitter.com/cD1D2byEnN
— Mr. Statistician Face Man (@tomhaberstroh) March 20, 2025
Nearly everyone involved with the league concedes that if teams played fewer games, the quality of games would improve. That is especially the case late in the season.
“If you want to play with a certain intensity and physicality and really leave it all out there on the court, I think it’s almost impossible to do that for 82 games over a season,” Poeltl said. “So you kind of end up in a situation where you either pull back a little bit and save some of that energy, which you don’t want to do. You want to give it your all every game. Or you’re forced to sit out some games and then that’s another thing that you don’t want to do.”
Lowering the number of games played while keeping the duration of the regular season — let’s start by subtracting those back-to-backs and instituting a 66-game season — would offer several benefits.
• Fewer games would allow for more recovery and rehabilitation time. Some injuries would be avoided or made less severe. Injuries that do happen would cause players to miss fewer games because they would be playing less often.
• The fewer games there are, the more value each game has. Combined with the additional pressure points provided by the Play-In Tournament — finishing fourth instead of fifth, sixth instead of seventh, eighth instead of ninth and 10th instead of 11th all come with notable advantages — there would be fewer games for teams to safely rest players without risking their place in the standings.
• Fewer games would translate to more practices, allowing lesser-used players to become more integrated into their teams when they have to fill in for injured players.
“A lot of times, because there is so much going on and there are games coming (quickly), it’s really hard to go into a deep dive on the opponent and do too much preparation because now you’re … putting too much in their brains that they cannot go out there and play as hard as you want,” Rajaković said. “And that’s really the art of all of this, figuring out how much information you share with them.
“With more time, in theory, in between the games, there will be more time for preparation, more film study, more reps on the court, more player development on the court (in practice). I think the players would be improving. I think availability of the players would be higher and the quality of the product itself, night in and night out, will be … higher.”
There are two impediments, history being the first. One league source said the NBA is beholden to its history and would be very surprised if it ever moved away from 82-game seasons for that reason. The league even made it so the NBA Cup is part of the 82-game schedule, with the tournament final not counting in league stats or standings. Likewise, stats in the Play-In Tournament are neither counted as regular season nor playoff stats.
More than that, the issue of money lingers. Basketball-related income is split essentially evenly between teams and players, and neither party is ready to lose 10 to 20 games worth of revenue. It’s a financial non-starter.
This is where the league and players have to look past the short-term. Good teams rest their best players in March for the same reason bad teams don’t mind losing: They need to have excellent players to chase playoff success and championships. For good teams, it is about keeping (or getting) those players healthy, and for bad teams, it is about acquiring them in the first place.
However, the more teams show fans these games aren’t important, the more fans will believe them. The NBA has a new 11-year, $76-billion television deal that begins next year, securing a baseline of financial stability. This is exactly the time to see if there is a way to improve the quality of each game, which could increase the revenue each game drives. That starts with making sure the best players are on the floor more often.
The new rule insisting players must log 65 games to be eligible for most postseason honors isn’t working on its own.
“We do a lot of traveling, a lot of back-to-backs that I don’t think a lot of people take into consideration,” Smart said. “And then you want us to go out here and play 100 percent every night? That’s tough to do — especially for a very long time. I’ve been doing it for 11 years. We’ve got a lot of people that have never come out here and played a fraction of that and are trying to tell us that we’re wrong for resting or we’re resting too much.
“Now you see guys with a lot of these injuries such as these soft-tissue … injuries because of the (lack of) rest. You’re pushing them, going from time zone to time zone, flight to flight.”
Rookie point guard Isaiah Collier, coach Will Hardy and the Utah Jazz are last in the Western Conference, yet continue to draw fans to home games at the Delta Center. (Reggie Hildred / Imagn Images)
There will always be bad teams. The NBA cannot change that. It can stop teams from accepting it, and sometimes even aspiring to it.
Fans notice. Anecdotally, I have spoken to many Raptors fans this year who have tuned out because it is not fun to have to consider cheering against their team. At one point in the last decade, the Raptors had a five-year sellout streak. Up until two years ago, a non-sellout was rare. Through 36 games this year, the Raptors are averaging 18,700 fans per game, 1,100 fans below capacity, dipping to as low as 16,324 for a game against Chicago in December.
The Wizards average 16,211 fans for home games, leaving nearly 20 percent of seats unfilled. The Hornets average about 2,000 empty seats per game. The Pelicans don’t sell 1,100 seats on average. Some of those teams are in problematic markets, but some represent real downturns.
The Jazz are one team that has been fine in that department despite being quite open about their modest short-term ambitions. The Jazz traded away franchise cornerstones Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert in the summer of 2022 and traded contributors from Play-In-contending teams before the deadline in 2023 and 2024. They are not concerned with winning this season. Yet, they have sold out every home game since December 2018.
Before his team’s game in Toronto earlier in March, Jazz coach Will Hardy touted the sellout streak, praising fans for understanding how tough, but essential, it is to develop young players.
“I don’t care who’s on the court. I want our fans to know that our team is going to play with a ton of passion and joy and a competitive spirit that they can identify with,” Hardy said. “I think that’s the part of team sports that’s amazing. People use team sports and watching team sports to escape from their own reality for a little bit. But there has to be something that’s relatable to keep you locked into it. And I think that’s where groups of people working together to accomplish a common goal, all those types of sentiments … draw people to team sports.”
There is something noble about the idea of building a team-wide standard of play and effort that is evident throughout an 18-man roster. Trying to build a core set of values everyone in a group holds near is immensely relatable.
The idea that losing in a professional setting is acceptable and, sometimes, advantageous?
Not so much.
— Jason Quick contributed to this story
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(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Photos: Jamie Sabau/ NBAE via Getty Images / Nic Antaya / Brian Fluharty / Getty Images )