Tanking strategies have infiltrated the Summer League

With multiple players out, the Charlotte Hornets pulled out all the stops to make sure they went home from Summer League.

It’s no secret that the Summer League is an exhibition. It’s no secret that teams have very little incentive to try hard to win, because the best case (at least for the Las Vegas Summer League) is that you play another game.

No one wins anything for winning the Summer League title, and by and large the players’ motivations range from fighting for a roster spot to trying to showcase an addition to their game to trying to show the team that invested in them exactly what they have and what they need to work on before the league starts. And none of those things, you’ll note, directly involve winning.

You could already see it sometimes in things like relatively veteran players ranging from Ante Zizic to Josh Jackson sitting out the later games in summer league. They had proved all they needed to, and so the teams wanted to give the younger guys a chance to shine without regard to winning.

But the Charlotte Hornets took it to a whole other level. After losing Malik Monk and Devonte’ Graham to injury, Willy Hernangomez also had to leave due to a death in the family. This left Dwayne Bacon and Miles Bridges as the only two rostered players from a Hornets’ Summer League squad that opened with the second highest odds of winning the Summer League. Then, as Isiah Thomas said on the broadcast, they offered Bacon to sit out if he wanted to, an opportunity that Bacon refused.

The coaching staff took matters into their own hands, instead. At the start of the fourth quarter, Miles Bridges subbed in for Arnoldas Kulboka. Which, for most of Summer League, would look like a perfectly ordinary action, since they both had been playing the power forward a lot. Except Arnoldas Kulboka was the center in that lineup, and Miles Bridges was left as the tallest Hornet on the court.

Fun fact — going through all of combine history that you can find on stats.nba.com, there are a total of zero power forwards with both a shorter height and shorter wingspan than Miles Bridges. And he skipped a step and played Center for a minute and change.

Which wouldn’t have been particularly noteworthy. The Hornets were shorthanded at center anyway, with a struggling Mangok Mathiang their only true option. They had already given minutes at the Center to Arnoldas Kulboka, but based on his rotation patterns he was either given a minutes restriction by his Euro team or the Hornets didn’t want to play him too much because he can’t come over until at least a year or two out.

They also put Luke Petrasek, second year player out of Columbia in briefly, but Petrasek is more of a combo forward than a center, and the coaching staff kind of seemed dead-set on not giving him minutes despite a small amount of success in what few minutes he did get.

Except then, when the game went into overtime, the Hornets opened with Miles Bridges at the center again. He took (and won) the opening tip, and the Hornets played out their next two minutes with virtually no protection inside, unsurprisingly culminating in a loss.

Replacing the guys who are actually tall enough to play the center was Terry Henderson, 6-foot-5 guard who had played 21 mostly unsuccessful minutes in Summer League before today’s game. With eight seconds left, Henderson found himself under the basket with 6-foot-10 Chris Boucher as Marquis Teague missed a floater that would have put the Raptors up three. Boucher pulled down the rebound over Henderson, went back up with Henderson’s left arm on his body, drew the shooting foul, and sunk the two free throws to end the game.

And the thing is, it’s not new for teams to use lineups that they know are bad in pursuit of losing. The Dallas Mavericks were fined for admitting that they had used analytics to determine bad lineups and intentionally played those more often in pursuit of tanking.

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But seeing it in Summer League is new, and while the Charlotte Hornets Summer League team was something of a perfect storm with regards to how much incentive they had to lose, it’s still disappointing to see teams actively strategizing to throw a game.