Silver: Teams Aren’t Tanking Just Rebuilding

You call it “tanking.”

NBA commissioner Adam Silver calls it “rebuilding.”

That’s what the league’s new boss said Wednesday when asked whether the NBA needed to do more to discourage teams from pinning their hopes on the draft lottery. Limiting the definition of tanking — at one point referring to it as “the T-word” — to intentionally losing individual games, Silver says he doesn’t think it exists.

“The coaches and players, or some subset of that group, trying to lose, I don’t think that’s going on anywhere in the NBA,” he told reporters after a speech to the Chief Executives’ Club of Boston at a downtown hotel. “And I would take action immediately if I thought it was.”

via Associated Press via ESPN