Hollinger & Duncan NBA Show - NBA Basketball Podcast · John Hollinger and Nate Duncan

2025 Deadline Retrospective; Knocking the Tread off the Tankers

·54 min·2 clips

The Jazz and Pacers fines show why the league is debating tanking penalties.

The show opens by acknowledging the All-Star Break delay and then gets right into the league's tanking problem. The hosts talk through the Jazz and Pacers fines and what those penalties are meant to signal. They care less about the headlines than about the structure underneath them. The argument keeps circling back to whether the league wants to stop tanking or just avoid looking bad. That turns into a broader discussion of possible tanking fixes and how they would actually work in practice. No solution is treated as automatic. They also use the episode to revisit last season's trade deadline a year later. That annual backward glance gives the conversation a different kind of seriousness. The Lakers and Luka come up as part of the wider deadline fallout. The hosts weigh what the team looks like now and how much future upside is still left to imagine. They discuss the possibility that the Lakers still need major summer improvement. Even with some hope, the path to true contention is treated as a stretch. The debate then shifts to which deadline move should count as the second most important one. The rescinded Mark Williams trade is raised and examined as a possibility. The Jimmy deal enters the conversation next. The hosts push back on the instinct to overrate it without thinking about age and team trajectory. They then land on the Fox trade as the more interesting move. The point is not just the player, but the fit and the timeline. The Spurs and Victor frame that argument. Fox is treated as part of a longer competitive window, not an isolated splash. That opens into a larger discussion of what teams are buying when they push chips in. The hosts keep coming back to the cost of that bet. They also note how some teams recover from mistakes and some do not. Good draft capital and prior decisions matter more than the headline move itself. The conversation circles back to the Cavs and the mechanics of making an expensive roster work. The team-building consequences matter just as much as the basketball. Expiring contracts, apron pressure, and roster flexibility all show up as part of the same story. Nothing stays separate from the cap sheet for long. The hosts are comfortable letting the discussion stay messy as long as the incentives stay clear. That is the point of the episode. By the end, they have covered the current tanking controversy and the previous year's deadline from a few different angles. The result is less a verdict than a hard-nosed audit of how NBA teams actually behave. The closing lands on the sense that the important questions were at least put on the table properly. It is the kind of episode that trusts the listener to follow the cap logic without needing everything flattened into a slogan.

As heard by us

A sharp NBA debate about tanking, deadline bets, and the incentives that make easy answers collapse.

This episode takes a direct, skeptical look at tanking and the incentives that keep making it seem rational. It also circles back to last season's trade deadline, moving between the Jazz and Pacers fines, possible ways to curb tanking, and what a year of hindsight says about the…

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Why you'd press play

You want a straight discussion of tanking and a year-later look at last season's trade deadline.

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