In each and every NBA and WNBA season, an edict, whether direct or indirect, comes down from the front office to teams at the bottom of the standings that it’s time to tank.
So long as a team owns its draft pick and is out of playoff contention, at some point in the season, it becomes more valuable to lose games than win. Sometimes that may happen in the final week of the season. Sometimes teams enter the season with that on the mind.
The one constant is that almost no one will admit this. That’s what
made Sparks head coach Lynne Roberts’ comments on Thursday eye-opening.
During shootaround ahead of the team’s game against the Dream, Roberts spoke to John W. Davis of the Southern California News Group and revealed that ownership has told her to tank, basically.
Well, that’s certainly saying the quiet part out loud.
During her pregame press conference, Roberts clarified her comments, noting that it wasn’t an edict to lose games, but instead a desire to get more minutes for younger players.
“I didn’t mean to insinuate [the] bench playing meaning we’re not trying to win,” Roberts said. “It’s this point in the season where we do want to see our young players but two things can be true where, every time we put on a uniform, we want to win. Our veterans deserve that anyway. But also, those guys can’t play 40 minutes and we want to give the younger guys, the bench maybe just longer stints. But not an abandonment of trying to win.”
That pregame quote doesn’t exactly contradict what was said during shootaround. If I were a guessing man, I’d say that someone in the front office, or Roberts herself, realized how that quote from shootaround sounded and wanted to make sure people knew they weren’t going to intentionally lose.
There is a bit of a misconception about tanking and that teams are just going out there to deliberately lose games. The players are still going to play hard, it’s just that the front office wants worse players on the court playing hard.
And with all due respect to the Sparks, they are playing hard. But they’re putting a host of young players out there who are going through growing pains, from Cameron Brink to Tonie Morgan to Monique Akoa Makani. All of those players played at least 15 minutes off the bench in the loss to the Dream.
Two things can be true. The Sparks want to see what they have in their young players, and they should. In doing so, they’re also going to lose more games, and they should.
It’s just that fans typically don’t hear about those conversations.
You can follow Jacob on Twitter at @JacobRude or on Bluesky at @jacobrude.bsky.social.
