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The current face of NBA tanking is a player averaging 13 points per game.
Pacers coach Rick Carlisle shed new light on the NBA’s attempt to crack down on tanking Tuesday during his weekly appearance on Indianapolis sports radio station 107.5 The Fan.
Carlisle spoke about the $100,000 fine the NBA levied on the franchise for sitting three players against the Jazz on Feb. 3, for the first time Tuesday, which led the league to release a statement over Aaron Nesmith, a role player on the Pacers.
“I didn’t agree with it,” Carlisle said. “There was a league lawyer that was doing the interview that kind of unilaterally decided that Aaron Nesmith, who had been injured the night before and couldn’t hold the ball, should have played in the game, which just seems ridiculous.”
Carlisle elaborated that the NBA declined to speak with the Pacers’ team doctors or Nesmith because “they didn’t need to.”
“This was shocking to me, and during the interview, they also asked if we considered medicating him to play in a game when we were 30 games under .500,” Carlisle said.
The NBA pushed back on Carlisle’s comments Tuesday afternoon, calling them “inaccurate.”
“An independent physician led the medical review,” a league spokesman said in a statement. “In addition, the Pacers’ General Manager and the team’s Senior Vice President, Sports Medicine and Performance were interviewed as part of the process. The Pacers confirmed that it had provided all of the information requested by the league and the team reported that an interview with Coach Carlisle or a team physician wasn’t necessary.”
The statement doesn’t include a comment about interviewing Nesmith, which Carlisle said never happened. It also comes 11 days after Silver said tanking “is worse this year than we’ve seen in recent memory.” The NBA plans to deploy multiple rule changes next season to combat tanking and is considering multiple options, including freezing the draft odds at the trade deadline.
Past vs. Present
Historically, the Pacers have never tanked as an organization and are doing so this year because star point guard Tyrese Haliburton tore his Achilles tendon in Game 7 of the NBA Finals, which cost him this current season. The franchise is an anomaly compared to the Nets, Wizards, and Jazz, all of which have been tanking for multiple seasons.
That Nesmith, a role player who is averaging a career-high 13 points per game, is now at the center of a tanking situation shows where the NBA’s attempt to eradicate it has led. Over the years, teams have been fined for resting star players in games, which Gregg Popovich famously started by resting Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, and Tony Parker against LeBron James’s Heat in 2013.
The Thunder won the 2025 NBA title through a rebuild that redefined tanking. The team shut down Al Horford and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, each toward the end of consecutive seasons, to help improve its draft stock and netted a pair of top-six picks as a result. The Thunder were never punished; instead, Silver gave them the Larry O’Brien Trophy this past June.
The Sixers were never punished for The Process, where the team tanked for multiple seasons to accrue high draft picks while assembling mediocre NBA rosters to do so.
The league has done things to attack tanking over the years, such as evening the lottery odds for the three-worst teams in 2019. But it might be why some of the league’s biggest stars have a hard time agreeing with their commissioner on it as a major issue.
While addressing reporters at the NBA All-Star Weekend, Warriors guard Stephen Curry was asked about tanking as a league-wide issue and if he had a fix for it. Curry pushed back on the notion that it was a problem, asking how many teams are actually doing it. When he was told “roughly a third of the league,” he challenged it.
“Even the teams in the Play-In?” Curry asked. “Is it really that big of a problem? I’m asking. We feel like there’s obviously a lot of competition. It’s something I’m sure every year the NBA wants to address, why the Play-in Tournament exists.”
In his pregame press conference Tuesday, Carlisle tried to move on from the situation, but said he’s always prioritized player health as a head coach, which is why he spoke out against the handling of Nesmith’s injury in the league’s inquiry.
“The Aaron Nesmith situation was bothersome to me. It really was bothersome to him,” Carlisle said. “Look, I don’t want to belabor this. It’s time to move on. It’s time to move forward, but player health—and you got a guy like that, that’s missed a lot of games over the last two years, and one reason is because he goes so hard and goes so hard for our organization—I just felt it was important to support him.”
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