The Utah Jazz accidentally won a basketball game on Monday night.
You read that right.
Utah, which made one of the biggest splashes of the NBA trade deadline by acquiring star forward Jaren Jackson Jr. and is in the fourth year of a rebuild, tried its hardest to lose. Head coach Will Hardy rested his starting frontcourt for the entirety of the fourth quarter and even opted not to call a timeout to draw up a play with the Jazz down 3 points late.
Asked after the game how close he was to bringing Jackson or fellow All-Star Lauri Markkanen into the game as it went down to the wire, Hardy said simply, “I wasn’t.”
Rarely has an NBA team been so brazen in its attempts to manipulate the standings and tank a season. But Utah has a top-eight protection on its first-round draft pick. So it has to receive a pick in the top eight at May’s draft lottery in order to keep its selection. Losing is the best way to ensure a high pick.
As the Jazz plunge ahead with increasingly creative attempts to sabotage their own season, ESPN’s Bobby Marks is sounding the alarm.
“I think what Utah is doing right now is messing around with the integrity of the NBA,” he said Tuesday on NBA Today.
“The ability to sit players, starters, in the fourth quarter, to not call timeouts in the fourth quarter … if you’re the league, you’re looking at it, ‘Alright, can we do some gimmicks? Can we alter protections, eliminate protections as far as picks, or can we bring the hammer down?”
Bobby Marks:
“I think what Utah is doing right now is messing around with the integrity of the NBA” pic.twitter.com/7KBRrt2Auq
— Oh No He Didn’t (@ohnohedidnt24) February 10, 2026
As the ESPN crew debated potential solutions and expressed concern over the impacts of teams like Utah messing with — as Marks said — the “integrity” of the game, Marks emphasized that the league deserves more blame than any one individual team.
“There’s always going to be a way for teams to manipulate the rules, whether we go [with] a shortened season or freeze the records here, there’s always going to be something there that teams are going to [do],” Marks said. “And as one team [told me], it’s not about the gimmicks anymore, it’s about the league actually having a hard conversation to address this.”
Marks said he expects NBA commissioner Adam Silver will address the issues during the upcoming All-Star weekend in Los Angeles. But concerns around tanking in the NBA have existed for more than a decade.
Coupled with the league’s or its players’ refusal to genuinely engage with ideas for shortening the season, tanking is a blemish on the NBA that won’t go away. As a result, the league is continually plagued by more headlines about injuries, load management, and generally negative energy around the sport than almost any league in America.
