Report:  NBA Owner berated his head coach for winning a road game recently instead of tanking

What's the story?

On a recent edition of The Woj Pod, ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski revealed a very interesting bit of information. In a time where NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is trying to come down hard on teams trying to tank, one NBA owner recently chewed out his head coach for winning a game (h/t to Bleacher Report).

In case you didn't know...

The NBA Draft Lottery began in 1985 under then NBA Commissioner David Stern. Throughout those 38 years, the lottery has undergone many changes, and currently only the top three picks are chosen via the draft lottery, with the remaining lottery picks being ordered in inverse order of the regular season standings.

The heart of the matter...

On his podcast, Wojnarowski said that within the past several weeks, there was an instance of an NBA owner berating his head coach for winning a game on the road. Not only was it a win on the road, but it was a win against a really good team.

"I know of an instance of an owner berating, really berating his coach here in the last several weeks of the season for going in and beating a pretty good team on the road, going, 'What are you doing?'"

As previously mentioned, Silver is cracking down on tanking. Just the public mention of it by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban cost him a $600k fine.

Currently, the worst team in the NBA has a 25% chance of drawing the top pick in the 2018 NBA Draft, but in continued efforts to curb tanking, that will change next year. The bottom three teams will all get an equal 14% chance of drawing the top pick starting with the 2019 NBA Draft.

What's next?

Before we can get to the NBA Draft Lottery, the NBA needs to crown a champion for the 2017-18 season. Currently, the NBA is in the early stages of the first round of the playoffs, and the second round is set to tip off sometime between April 28th and 30th.

Author's take...

It's odd because tanking is definitely a problem, but it does have a success story in the Philadelphia 76ers. They were terrible for so long, but now with the core of young talent such as Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons, they earned a 3-seed in the Eastern Conference for the playoffs.

Hopefully, the changes to the draft lottery system next year will help fix the problem.