The NBA fined the Brooklyn Nets $100,000 on Thursday for violating the league’s player participation policy when the team sat several players during a game against the Milwaukee Bucks week.
The Nets sat Spencer Dinwiddie (rest), Dorian Finney-Smith (left knee soreness), Cam Johnson (right knee sprain/injury maintenance) and Nic Claxton (left ankle sprain/injury maintenance) in the 144-122 loss to the Bucks. Nets coach Jacque Vaughn also didn’t play Mikal Bridges, Cam Thomas or Royce O’Neale after the first quarter of the game, which came just one day after they beat the Detroit Pistons.
The NBA said that “four Nets rotation players, who did not participate in the game, could have played.”
“We’ve been very clear with teams what we are trying to accomplish, and what we’d like to see,” NBA executive vice president and head of basketball operations Joe Dumars . “And, if I’m just cutting to the chase, if you’re gonna sit four starters at one time that’s going to violate the policy and it violates the spirit of what we’re trying to do here.”
Vaughn didn’t get into specifics when he explained why he sat so many of his players for the game, other than saying that he had to “think short term and long term” for the “betterment of the group.”
The in an effort to stop teams from sitting star players during games, something that’s been a problem in recent years. Teams are fined $100,000 for the first violation, $250,000 for a second violation and then increasing fines by $1 million increments for each subsequent violation.
While there are exceptions to this policy, teams are generally prohibited from sitting multiple star players, or using them in reduced roles, during national TV games, in-season tournament games or when the “integrity of the game” is at stake. By resting four starters, and then sitting three other players after the first quarter, the NBA is saying that the Nets did just that.
This was the first time that the NBA has fined a team for violating the policy.
“We are serious about this,” Dumars said, . “We talked to people, we talked to everyone, all parties we talked to before the season started. And to not follow through with this would not be right of us. It would not be the thing to do, to not follow through. So yeah, we are very serious about this. We communicated, we overly communicated with everyone about this, and we made very clear that if your guys can play or we feel that your guys can play, they should be on the court. And it’s gone over extremely well this year.
“So this is not just about the Nets, it’s about the policy itself. It’s about where we stand. It’s about us holding to the things that we said that we were going to hold to. So it’s not just, I don’t want this just to be about the Nets. I think it’s overall about the policy, and the NBA is very serious about this policy.”
That loss to the Bucks sparked a five-game losing skid for the Nets, who now hold a 15-20 record. The Nets will host the Oklahoma City Thunder next on Friday night.
