Both pretty much sacrifice games and screw people who pay. Both do it for supposed benefits for their team. Both situations suck for the league and fans. In both cases, coaches still coached hard and players still played hard. Reasons are different, end product is the same.
Yeah, it is. Look at the big picture. If Stern fines the Spurs for not playing Duncan/Parker/Ginobili, then he's controlling player rotations. Next time, let's say that Pop wants to rest his players again, and he plays them each 1 minute. Since Stern had already fined them before, that set the precedent and gives him leeway to fine them again. He's not breaking any rule, and he's preparing his players for the playoffs like a good coach should. It's a professional decision, and Stern is taking it personally.
If it was only the Spurs who had this kind of schedule, maybe Mr. PopoBitch has a case. But if all the rest of the teams have their own stretch of bad schedules, why should a coach one up other coaches AT THE EXPENSE of the fans?
Lol, he does have a case. The rest of the league does have the same scheduling issues but all team are not as old as the Spurs. Pop should be able to make whatever decision he wants based on his teams best interest. The only reason this is an issue is because it's the Heat and a TNT game.
The rule of the NBA is trying to make money and Pop thinks the long-term competitiveness of his team is more important than that. Stern is trying to run a business here, and he doesn't need piss-ants like Pop damaging the value proposition of the product he's selling. This isn't high school. This isn't a Homeowner's Association. Hiding behind rules isn't going to cut it. If this was a restaurant chain, and a manager decided one day to send waiters home and just use the bus-boys, he's going to get a call from corporate. If it was a law firm that decided to go to trial with the paralegals (okay, they can't because they haven't passed the bar, but still...), the client isn't going to pay. This is a business and the goal of the business is NOT winning a champtionship. The goal is to maximize profit. If Pop is not aligned with the goal of the business, he deserves to be punished.
Pop should be able to do whatever he wants with his team. If people don't understand that, they don't understand what it takes to win in the NBA. Nobody should care what Stern thinks, the commissioner doesn't set the lineups... the coach does.
I'd argue if the system doesn't incentivize Pop to have the same goals as the overall business, that's a flaw in the system. Pop's incentive is to have his team go deep in the playoffs, and he is rewarded if they do. He doesn't benefit from going all-out to win a national TV game; in fact, it probably hurts his larger goal by adding to the risk of injury for a likely unwinnable game. If the league wants him to prioritize the national TV games, then they need to fix the broken incentive scheme so that team and league goals are better aligned. If you arbitrarily punish him however without an explicit rule to base it on, on the other hand, he's just going to play his players 1 minute the next game this comes up. Or 5, or 10, or whatever is the absolute minimum for however you define compliance. Nobody will be punished then. And still nobody will be happy.
The problem with your analogy is that Pop substituted NBA players (Duncan/Ginobili/Parker) with other NBA players (Neal/Splitter/Blair). It's not like he was playing the ballboys or anything. Sorry, but you can't punish people unless they break rules.
Stern is taking it like a good businessman should. And the situation you've described is crazy and should be fined.
On what grounds should it be fined? You can't hand out punishments unless a rule is broken. What rule has been broken? And btw, I can totally see Pop playing each of them 1 minute just to prove a point.
Seems hypocritical to me, all the people who are sooooo butthurt over this but couldn't be bothered to care the last 50 times Popovich did it, or the April 2012 Warriors, or when Mike Brown rested the injured-but-playable Kobe before the playoffs last year. Or, you know, when the Heat did the exact same thing. There is not a "but this is national TV" argument to be made. Every game has people that paid for tickets, national or not. Every game has advertisers that paid for airtime, national or not. Every game has people tuning in on TV expecting to see certain guys, national or not. This happens all the time in various forms, you can't just pick a particularly flamboyant instance and ONLY care about that.
And I suspect the NBA won't punish Pops. It will punish the Spurs. I'm sure the ownership agreements have set general principles regarding common business interests and product. Then the Spurs can kindly ask Pop to stop. And if they don't, then the Spurs will get fined again.
Not sure what answer you expect here. Show me an authentic ownership agreement, or authentic NBA constitution copy, and I'll tell you which specific rule to use.
But aren't the Spurs' goals aligned with Pop's? Deeper playoff run = more playoff money to the franchise. Again, the individual (team) goal is at odds with the league goal by the way it was designed. If you penalize the Spurs for doing what's in their individual interests, do you penalize Donald Sterling for his individual interest (saving money) being at odds with the league's too? Do you penalize teams for tanking at the end of the season, putting out an unwatchable product because it will benefit them in a higher draft pick? It's a slippery slope.
I expect you to acknowledge that even though Pop didn't act in the best interest of the fans, he didn't break and rules and therefore shouldn't be punished.
I agree there is a misalignment in the incentive system and the league shouldn't be (and isn't) shocked to see teams conserve players, sit a guy occasionally for a made-up injury, or trade away players to intentionally be bad. But, it's usually done with a pretext to maintain the customer relationship. To just pull out your 4 best guys and sending a big F U to 18,000 paying customers and all the businesses paying to market in that game is qualitatively different. Customers know injuries happen; customers know when a team has no talent and is going to suck; but they have a reasonable expectation that healthy starters will play in the game they bought tickets to. At that point, you don't just say 'I need to tweak my incentive structure,' you go b****-slap the dumb-ass team who thought it was cool to do something like that.
