Editor’s note: This article was originally published on X. It has been republished with permission and edited for length and Deseret News style.
The NBA fined the Utah Jazz $500,000 last Thursday for the crime of managing their roster. The league’s stated reason was “conduct detrimental to the league,” specifically that head coach Will Hardy benched Lauri Markkanen and Jaren Jackson Jr. in the fourth quarter of two games during a recent road trip.
One of those games, against Miami, Utah actually won.
Let that settle for a moment. The Utah Jazz won a basketball game and were fined half a million dollars for it.
Commissioner Adam Silver’s statement carried the weight of a man who believes he is protecting something sacred: “Overt behavior like this that prioritizes draft position over winning undermines the foundation of NBA competition and we will respond accordingly to any further actions that compromise the integrity of our games.”
Integrity. That word does a lot of heavy lifting in the NBA. It gets deployed like a weapon whenever the league needs to make an example of someone, and the someone always seems to be from a place like Utah, never from the gilded coasts where the league’s real power brokers operate.
Jazz owner Ryan Smith fired back on social media with the incredulity of a man who has heard this song before: “Agree to disagree ... Also, we won the game in Miami and got fined? That makes sense ...”
It doesn’t make sense. Not unless you understand that for the Utah Jazz, the rules of the NBA have always been applied with a different hand.
There is something almost poetic about the timing. As the league descended on Los Angeles for yet another reinvented All-Star Weekend — this year’s format being the fourth overhaul in eight years — it chose this moment to lecture a small-market franchise about the integrity of competition. The same league that has watched its showcase game devolve into something so unwatchable that even Commissioner Silver was visibly annoyed after the 2024 edition, where the final score was 211-186 and the players treated defensive effort like an optional accessory.
The NBA’s All-Star Game problem is, at its core, a respect problem. The best players in the world — players making tens of millions of dollars, players who have been voted in by fans who actually care about the game — can’t be bothered to play defense for a single evening. LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Anthony Edwards all skipped All-Star Weekend entirely last year. Victor Wembanyama has openly pleaded with his peers to take the game seriously, telling reporters, “I want to push the great players of this sport to play in the All-Star Game just as hard as I will. We’ll see how it goes. But if they don’t play hard, I’ll do it without them.”
When a 22-year-old has to beg his colleagues to try, you don’t have a tanking problem. You have a culture problem.
But the league doesn’t fine players for loafing through the All-Star Game. It doesn’t fine superstars who treat the fans’ votes as an inconvenience. It fines the Utah Jazz for making roster decisions in February.
This is not new territory for the franchise. The Jazz have been swimming against the current of the NBA’s institutional biases since the franchise arrived in Salt Lake City in 1979, refugees from a failed experiment in New Orleans. The Jazz brought nothing with them but a name that made no geographic sense, Mardi Gras colors that clashed with the Wasatch Mountains, and the immediate skepticism of a league that wasn’t sure the franchise would survive.
The story of the Jazz in Utah is, from the very beginning, a story about being unwanted.
In 1982, the Jazz held the third pick in the NBA Draft and selected Dominique Wilkins, one of the most electrifying talents in the history of the sport. Wilkins refused to report. He didn’t want to play in Utah.
“Going to Utah, I was not happy about that at that time,” Wilkins later admitted. He had ties to Magic Johnson and the AAU circuit in Atlanta. He wanted the bright lights, the bigger city. So the Jazz, financially strapped and out of leverage, shipped him to the Atlanta Hawks for John Drew, Freeman Williams and a million dollars in cash, a trade now universally regarded as one of the worst in NBA history.
Wilkins became a nine-time All-Star and a Hall of Famer. Drew struggled with substance abuse. Williams was out of the league within two years.
Imagine if Wilkins had played alongside John Stockton and Karl Malone. Imagine what that team could have been. But he didn’t want to be in Utah, and no one in the league — not the commissioner’s office, not the media — questioned his right to reject the franchise. The Jazz were expected to accept the slight quietly. They always have been.
The pattern has repeated itself across decades. Derek Harper turned down a trade to Utah’s Finals team in 1997.
“There was a Utah deal,” he told ESPN, “but you go live in Utah. Nothing against Utah or their team, but I don’t want to live there.”
Gordon Hayward left for Boston. Donovan Mitchell was traded to Cleveland, where he told Marc J. Spears of Andscape:
“It’s a little comforting for me, 100%. I’m not going to lie about that. It’s no secret there’s a lot of stuff that I dealt with being in Utah off the floor. If I’m being honest with you, I never really said this, but it was draining. It was just draining on my energy just because you can’t sit in your room and cheer for me and then do all these different things. I’m not saying specifically every fan, but I just feel like it was a lot of things. A (Utah) state senator (Stuart Adams) saying I need to get educated on my own Black history. Seeing Black kids getting bullied because of their skin color. Seeing a little girl (Isabella Tichenor) hang herself because she’s being bullied.
“Man, it was just one thing after another. And I will say, it’s not the only place it happens. But for me, I’m continuing to be an advocate for (racial equality) and to receive the amount of pushback I got over the years, it was a lot.”
Mitchell’s words stung because they carried truth. And they stung because they landed on a fan base that had, in many ways, loved him as much as any player since Stockton and Malone.
The Jazz have watched, again and again, as the NBA’s star-driven economy has told them the same thing: you can develop talent, but you can’t keep it.
So when Silver lectures the Jazz about the integrity of competition, Smith and Danny Ainge are left to wonder: where was this energy when their stars were being poached? Where was this concern for competitive balance when the league’s most marketable players were engineering their way to coastal superteams?
The Deseret News captured the absurdity perfectly in a commentary published the day after the fine: the NBA has explicitly told every franchise that the teams with the worst records have the best chance at the most talented draft prospects. But don’t try to lose. The league has stressed the importance of parity and balanced opportunities for building great teams. But star players are allowed to demand and force their way to large-market franchises, never to places like Utah.
This is the fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of the NBA’s competitive structure, and the Jazz are caught in its gears. The league has created a system that incentivizes losing, then punishes teams for responding rationally to those incentives.
Meanwhile, the two most dominant teams in the Western Conference built their rosters through the exact same process. Sam Presti’s Thunder endured years of deliberate roster teardowns, rolling out G League-caliber lineups while Shai Gilgeous-Alexander sat on the bench. The Spurs secured Victor Wembanyama through a historically bad season. No one fined them.
As Draymond Green pointed out on his podcast: “Utah has to stay within the top eight or their pick goes to Oklahoma City. Only problem with that is Sam Presti just won a championship last year doing what Utah is doing. It ain’t so fun when the rabbit got the gun.”
There is also the matter of OKC working behind the scenes. According to Tony Jones of The Athletic, the Thunder have been “going through back channels” to plant stories about the Jazz’s lineup decisions, pressuring them to remain competitive, because Oklahoma City holds Utah’s first-round pick if it falls outside the top eight.
Then there is the matter of the fans.
The NBA has a fan problem, and it is not the problem the league thinks it has. The problem is not that fans are too rowdy. The problem is that the league has systematically communicated to its paying customers that their experience is secondary to the comfort and brand management of its players.
The message to fans has been clear: pay your money, cheer when appropriate, and accept that the players may or may not feel like giving you a competitive product on any given night. In 2008, Jazz fans taunted Derek Fisher about his daughter’s cancer diagnosis, genuinely vile behavior that no one should defend. But the response to those outliers has been a creeping institutional posture that treats the entire paying public as a liability rather than the lifeblood of the sport.
The Malice at the Palace in 2004, when Ron Artest charged into the stands in Detroit after a fan threw a drink at him, was a watershed moment that changed the NBA forever. Nine players were suspended, five fans were arrested and the league overhauled its security protocols. That brawl was the result of a specific, extreme set of circumstances. But the institutional memory of that night has calcified into a permanent defensive crouch.
Every heated exchange, every confrontation, every moment of friction between player and fan is treated as a potential Malice, and the default response is to side with the player and punish the customer.
Here is where all of these threads converge. The Jazz sit at the intersection of every tension in modern professional basketball.
They are a small-market franchise being punished for playing within a system that was designed to benefit teams exactly like them. They exist in a league that has told them — through free agency snubs, through player demands, through media indifference — that they are not a destination. They play in front of fans who are simultaneously told that their passion matters and that their behavior is under surveillance. And they are coached by a man, Will Hardy, who, when asked whether he considered playing his stars in the fourth quarter, gave perhaps the most honest answer any NBA coach has delivered this season: “I wasn’t.”
The Jazz have been fined for honesty. They have been fined for winning. They have been fined for responding logically to a system the league itself created. And they have been fined while the league scrambles, for the fourth consecutive year, to figure out why its own All-Star players won’t bother to play defense in a game that fans actually want to watch.
Jaren Jackson Jr. has a tumor in his knee. He played two games for the Jazz after being traded from Memphis. He embraced his new city. He showed up. And now he needs season-ending surgery, a fact that makes the “integrity of competition” argument ring particularly hollow. Here was a player who wanted to be on the court, who played through discomfort for a franchise he had just joined, and the league’s response was to fine his team for managing his minutes.
Utah has always been an afterthought in the NBA’s imagination. It is too small, too white, too far from the cultural centers that drive the league’s marketing machine. It is the place where players don’t want to go and the franchise that fans outside of the 801 rarely think about. But the Jazz keep showing up. They keep building. They keep playing the long game in a league that rewards impatience and punishes discipline.
And the fans keep showing up, too. The Delta Center, one of the loudest and most hostile arenas in the NBA for visiting teams, drew a sellout crowd of 18,186 for Jaren Jackson Jr.’s home debut, a Wednesday night game against a depleted Sacramento Kings team in the middle of an 18-win season.
That is what the NBA’s integrity looks like in practice. Not in the commissioner’s carefully worded statements, not in the fines levied from a league office in Manhattan, but in a building full of people who paid for tickets to watch a team with the sixth-worst record in the league because they believe in what is being built.
Danny Ainge and his son Austin are trying to rebuild the franchise through the draft, the only viable path for a team that free agents ignore and that stars eventually leave. They traded for Jackson. They are developing young players like Keyonte George, Ace Bailey and Cody Williams. They are doing exactly what the NBA’s structure tells small-market teams to do. And they are being fined for it.
Brian Windhorst said it best on ESPN’s “First Take” the morning after the fine: “I’m giving the tankers a pass. They’re incentivized to do this. Therefore, I am determining that these are good people who are good at their jobs having to make bad decisions.”
Good people, making the best of bad options, in a league that has given them no other choice.
Utah against the world. Don’t call it a comeback, we’ve been here for years.