	1	2	3	4	F
UTA	33	41	36	37	147
MEM	30	22	22	27	101

NBA

A night to be ashamed of in the NBA

Jazz and Grizzlies shared a pantomime with more than twenty players out, only thirteen players on the court, and their minds focused on draft lottery options.

Rob Gray

Juanma Rubio Calum Roche

Update: Apr 11th, 2026 02:27 EDT

After months of talk about tanking, with an endless debate over solutions – some seemingly on the way – that risk doing nothing (solutions that solve nothing) or, worse still, making matters even worse through unintended side effects, the end of the regular season arrives dressed up as a grand finale. Two all-in slates, Friday and Sunday, with every team in action and a day’s rest in between. It should feel like the old transistor-radio afternoons, fans biting their nails, crossing their fingers their team doesn’t slip, nervously glancing at other scoreboards. There should be spots under threat, teams pushing for home-court advantage, permutations tied to that play-in designed to spice up the Florida bubble and kept alive, in theory, so moments like this actually matter. It should feel alive, unpredictable, urgent. But the promise of chaos and consequence dissolves almost instantly into something far flatter.

The reality is that, in the end, the finish line becomes – as with so much in today’s NBA – just another reminder that, one way or another, the games barely matter. The calculations that count most revolve around losing, tanking and the draft. The list of absences, whether for rest or injury, could circle the league offices in Manhattan. Play-in and playoff positions are largely locked. The permutations of moving up or down a spot don’t seem to carry much weight – some would rather figure out if it’s better to lose to pick an opponent. And the bottom of the standings is a mockery of the competition on a dramatic scale. What should be tension turns into a spreadsheet of incentives pointing the wrong way.

For the Machiavellian – or simply the practical – it makes sense. Understandable, even. Those who have spent months committed to it, long past any trace of embarrassment or guilt, aren’t about to have a late surge of pride that costs them the percentage points they’ve chased through a parade of indignities. Much of their fan base prefers it this way. Social media has a field day producing content. And whoever hits the jackpot, dives into the depths and then resurfaces in style will be applauded in a few years as a model of front-office engineering. That’s how it’s done – if the lottery smiles and enough things break your way. Victories are terrible for memory and therefore excellent for the release of endorphins.

The league, for its part, signals that it’s working on it, turning over complex, technocratic ideas that seem to cling to the notion that the more complicated something is, the better it must be. At least it keeps the content machine humming, feeds the endless stream of takes, rankings and reactions. The last set of changes – flattening the lottery odds – has backfired spectacularly, leading straight to this awkward, distorted finish. Instead of simplifying, the instinct is to keep adding layers. If this doesn’t work, there will be more formulas, more tweaks, more unintended consequences.

The monument to all this – the epic closing act of a grand farce – was a Jazz-Grizzlies game that neither side wanted to win. Not a new reality for the average NBA fan, let alone the more invested ones, but here pushed into the grotesque. A Viking funeral for what remains of meaning, somewhere between the practical and the incomprehensible, between the letter and the spirit of the rules, across a wider-than-usual group of teams this season. The draft looms so large that it distorts everything around it. Rebuilds pile up, decisions blur, and what should be competition turns into choreography.

Teams don’t procrastinate for the sake of it, but they make mistakes, or they’re worse in the front office than others, or they lack luck – which matters – and end up punished by new formulas that drift away from a simple idea that perhaps deserves to be restated: the worst teams should get the best young players and accelerate their rebuilds. That’s the spirit of the draft. The clever minds have made it sound naïve. Yet simplicity is often where both logic and fairness meet.

Some of this should at least ease the burden on the Grizzlies and Jazz. I won’t say blame the game, not the player, because that axiom risks reopening another murky issue – betting – which could lurk behind the NBA’s interest in the manipulation of certain scores and stats, even if recent appearances by Adam Silver have induced a convenient amnesia around that dark, highly lucrative subject. The league’s justice hammer swings at those who flirt with the integrity of games. Remarkable. A system under strain tends to reveal its weakest points.

The Jazz were already fined in what felt like a performative gesture, and subsequent events have shown just how hollow it was. There was, in any case, a game, and it ended 147-101. The Jazz, who had lost ten straight, beat the Grizzlies, now on a seven-game skid. Utah now sits at 22-29, Memphis at 22-56. The Jazz risked losing up to 10% of their chances at a top-four pick… by winning. Even victory comes with consequences when the incentives are inverted.

They did – ties aren’t not allowed, not yet – but the first win since March 19 didn’t sting much, because the Kings beat the Warriors in a game that, by this point’s logic, they probably should have lost. Sacramento, never quite sure what it’s doing, pushes buttons until something lights up green. At least it introduces a human dose of chaos, which, in these shifting sands, is oddly welcome.

The Grizzlies, too, could have lost up to 7% of their top-four odds by winning (imagine that). Now they’ll face the Mavericks on the final day to decide who ends up with the sixth-best odds at the No. 1 pick. Let’s see who loses better. The Jazz, meanwhile, should defend their bottom-four status with a loss to the Lakers, one of the four worst records and a small but meaningful bump in the odds. Strategy spirals into parody when defeat becomes a tool.

Before tip-off, Jazz and Grizzlies – essentially playing a G League game – listed 24 players on their injury reports, either out or doubtful. Utah had nine ruled out by designation and rested three more. Memphis had 12 absences, more than $140 million in salaries unavailable on a payroll of $173.5 million. Thirteen players took the floor in total: seven for the Jazz, six for the Grizzlies. Most were barely recognizable even to devoted fans. A professional league reduced, for a night, to something unrecognizable.

G League call-ups, 10-day contracts, undrafted players. I won’t list the lineups – it would feel like an insult to those who played and did what they could, many fighting for a future from the margins of a league that generates record revenues while moving through contradictions and shadows at high speed. They are not the problem.

In a statistical farce, it was the first game in NBA history where one team (the Jazz) had ten players score in double figures, four with at least ten rebounds, five double-doubles and two triple-doubles. Utah went from 2008 (Carlos Boozer) to 2024 (Jordan Clarkson) without a triple-double – a rarity in this era – only to get two here from the only bench players who saw the floor: John Konchar (11 points, 11 rebounds, 10 assists) and Bez Mbeng (27, 11, 11). Numbers piled up, but meaning drained away.

For Memphis, Isaiah Whitehead had 16 points, shooting almost every possession, when the score was 34-34. Lest he get hot and ruin the script, he sat until the fourth quarter, by which point his team trailed by 42. The deficit peaked at 55 for a roster with five and a half players, and Jahmai Masack posted a triple-double – almost a quadruple if you count turnovers: 13, 15, 14 and 10. But again, singling out the players would be unfair. The absurdity lies elsewhere.

The issue is the system. One that creates monsters and ends in tragicomic skits like this, while some shrug and say what else can they do – and they may not be wrong – and the league strikes a pose, floats solutions that seem to please almost no one, and keeps the machine running. When the structure bends this far, everything built on it follows.

	Min	Pts	TR	OR	DR	Ast	Los	Rec	Blk	S1	S2	S3	CF
2 Blake Hinson	34	30	2	0	2	2	2	2	0	2/2	8/10	4/9	0
5 Cody Williams	33	14	3	0	3	5	2	0	0	0/2	4/10	2/6	0
34 Oscar Tshiebwe	28	16	22	4	18	3	1	1	2	2/4	7/11	0/0	2
19 Ace Bailey	28	23	10	2	8	2	3	3	1	0/0	7/12	3/7	0
1 Kennedy Chandler	40	26	5	0	5	10	4	2	0	0/4	7/13	4/7	2
55 John Konchar	35	11	11	2	9	10	3	5	2	2/2	3/3	1/3	4
42 Kevin Love	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0/0	0/0	0/0	0
21 Bez Mbeng	38	27	11	4	7	11	1	3	0	2/3	11/16	1/3	1
10 Svi Mykhailiuk	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0/0	0/0	0/0	0

	Min	Pts	TR	OR	DR	Ast	Los	Rec	Blk	S1	S2	S3	CF
72 Adama Bal	38	18	2	0	2	4	1	1	1	3/3	3/4	3/8	2
5 Toby Okani	41	20	2	2	0	2	1	0	0	0/0	7/14	2/8	3
21 Jahmai Mashack	48	13	15	1	14	14	10	2	0	1/2	6/11	0/2	3
0 Dariq Whitehead	23	21	3	1	2	0	3	0	0	2/2	5/8	3/10	0
55 Lucas Williamson	48	13	13	3	10	3	1	4	0	1/1	3/6	2/13	3
67 Taj Gibson	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0/0	0/0	0/0	0
32 Rayan Rupert	39	16	12	4	8	4	3	3	1	1/1	6/14	1/11	4
10 Javon Small	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0/0	0/0	0/0	0

A night to be ashamed of in the NBA

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