The Athletic summarizes what Adam Silver said about various topics: tanking, Kawhi, expansion

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Silver Bullets ​ Kirby Lee / Imagn Images The biggest tank-aways from NBA commish When NBA commissioner Adam Silver spoke to the media on Saturday during All-Star weekend, the biggest topic was tanking. Tanking is such an issue that Silver didn’t even try to find more league-friendly nomenclature like Marc Stein’s Draft Positioning Prioritization Mode. Or maybe it was just to make the conversation easier? Regardless, Silver openly said the word “tanking” over and over as he addressed the issue. We essentially have nine teams refusing to put the best product on the floor, and the Bucks are the only non-Play-In Tournament squad still openly holding out hope for a better tomorrow by competing today. “Every possible remedy to stop” tanking is being considered, Silver said. That’s awesome! The league isn’t closing itself off from solutions. But what does that mean? “It’s time to take a fresh look at this and to see whether that’s an antiquated way of going about doing it,” Silver said of the NBA Draft Lottery, in which the 14 teams that do not make the postseason have a chance to land the No. 1 pick in the draft. The NBA recently fined the Jazz $500,000 for keeping Lauri Markkanen and Jaren Jackson Jr. out of fourth quarters in consecutive games, which is funny because they accidentally won one of those games. They also fined the Pacers $100,000 for keeping Pascal Siakam out of a game. But the fines aren’t severe enough to stop teams. Then what could happen? Taking away draft picks? Maybe. Change the way the lottery is weighted? On the table. Abolish the draft altogether? I don’t think they’re prepared to go that extreme yet. Silver didn’t seem to have any direct ideas he was willing to share, if they even exist yet. League officials are going to, again, discuss every possible solution to fix this problem. You can’t have fans paying full price for intentional slop. (Although I think tanking teams should charge full price, but use at least half of that as a credit toward next season’s tickets for those fans.) Regardless, we’re going to come to a head with this thing pretty soon. There were two other big items on the ledger for the news conference. What’s going on with the Kawhi Leonard/Clippers investigation? Silver isn’t close to a decision on punishment (if any) because he’s not doing the investigation. There’s a law firm still doing its due diligence in figuring out if the Clippers circumvented the cap. Many people around All-Star weekend were wondering if Silver had it in him to drop the hammer on the Clippers if there’s evidence that they cheated in this way. I wonder if we’ll find out before the season is over. Do we have any clarity on expansion? Absolutely not. Las Vegas and Seattle are the presumed front-of-the-line options, but all Silver would commit to is that the league is still planning on making a decision this year.