Pacers buy D-League’s Mad Ants, tying all 19 teams to single NBA affiliate
The NBA Development League was conceived as a sort of analogue to minor-league baseball, a place where young players could develop into quality contributors without soaking up precious big-club playing time (or money, in many cases). By most metrics, the league has succeeded. While teams have folded and some high-lottery rookies have not benefited from the D-League experience, the general plan has worked. With 19 teams in the league, NBA squads can send players down with the expectation that they will get valuable experience without losing sight of the franchise’s broader goals.
[Follow Dunks Don’t Lie on Tumblr: The best slams from all of basketball]
As of this week, those 19 teams are now all tied to a single affiliate (and in some case owner) NBA club. The Indiana Pacers announced Wednesday that they have purchased the Fort Wayne Mad Ants, the league’s latest runner-up and last remaining unaffiliated franchise. The Pacers are now the 10th NBA team to own their own D-League team.
Candace Buckner of the Indianapolis Star provides some insight into why the Pacers made this move:
“We do have a lot of young players and we’re not going to be able to play them all, so we’re going to be sending some up here, maybe some back and forth,” said Larry Bird, the Pacers president of basketball operations. “After practicing for so long, you’ll need games to get better. So this is a perfect breeding ground to get us more playing time for our young players.”
Formerly owned by the Fort Wayne Basketball Group, LLC, the Mad Ants joined the D-League in 2007 and won the championship in 2014. In the past, Fort Wayne operated as a busy terminal for many NBA hopefuls. Last season, 13 NBA teams — including the Pacers — shared an affiliation with the Mad Ants. With that arrangement, the desires of the Pacers’ front office did not always align with the team as it attempted to stay competitive. […]
“It wasn’t a good fit for me and really the Mad Ants,” Bird said about the previous relationship, “because it seemed like every time we send a player up here, he was getting about 18 minutes. Well, in our mind, he should be playing 30, but I understood their situation. They’re trying to win basketball games, and you send a player up here and you tell him to play for 35 minutes and start losing two to three games, then it sets you back. I understand all that. Now that we own the team, we can sort of dictate more in how it flows.” […]
“When we’re together, we can use it better,” Pacers owner Herb Simon said, explaining his reason for buying the Mad Ants. “With the league changing and salaries going up, we’re going to need a lot of young players to go along with the high-paid players and some of them will have to come here and get time. So it’s going to work out very well.”
There are two aspects to the decision, one of which involves on-court decisions and the other of which is tied primarily to money. Let’s discuss the latter first, because it is almost too confusing to discuss at length. According to Simon, the Pacers will benefit from owning a D-League team when salaries rise (relative to the salary cap, of course) because they will be able to pick out cheap players to fill out the roster with ease. On the other hand, he just paid a considerable sum of money for the right to employ those players. We will have to wait and see if the savings prove considerable.
[Yahoo Sports Fantasy Football: Sign up and join a league today!]
The more immediate benefit to the Pacers is clear — they will have the chance to develop young players like 19-year-old rookie big man Myles Turner without wondering if they will receive the ideal amount of playing time or the necessary instruction to thrive in their system. That consistency between the Pacers and Mad Ants should make it less worrisome to send raw talents to the D-League, particularly when the player is a high-profile draft pick expected to contribute in some way before the end of the season. That process becomes much easier when the minor and major league teams employ similar approaches.
Yet the Pacers have now created a problem for the 11 NBA teams without an affiliate. The Mad Ants had previously served as the default affiliate for teams like the Pacers, so more than one-third of the 30 NBA clubs will now have to place players in need of D-League experience with their peers and rivals. Such relationships will presumably be created with a mind for regional and tactical affinities, but it’s still a bit of a mess. When the Mad Ants were unaffiliated, at least each team that put players on the roster was in a similar situation. Now those teams without affiliates will have to hope their players are given reasonable amounts of playing time despite lacking control over the D-League team’s affairs.
There’s an easy way to solve this problem — each NBA team eventually purchases or heavily invests in its own D-League affiliate. At that point, the D-League would become a true minor league, one in which philosophies can permeate every level of the organization in a manner similar to the much-discussed (and much-mocked) “Cardinal Way” in Major League Baseball. (Perhaps a strong minor league would even cause the NBA to expand the draft to allow for the creation of deep farm systems.) However, that system would also create new problems, most notably those related to supporting 30 teams in smaller cities that may not wish to house professional basketball teams. Would the NBA create a fund to help subsidize these costs? Would franchises foot the bill? Would existing NBA players be forced to accept salary cuts for owners to contemplate funding their own D-League affiliates?
The league and its teams are at least a few years from making these decisions, so we should not speculate wildly. But it would be prudent not to dismiss Simon’s worries about rising players salaries as unrelated to the D-League issue, because they are tied to each other as long as owners want them to be. As commissioner Adam Silver proved in July, every NBA operating expense eventually becomes a reason for management to worry about the long-term health of the league.
– – – – – – –
Eric Freeman is a writer for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
