How seriously will NBA penalize Raptors for allegations in Knicks lawsuit?
Newly hired head coach Darko Rajaković’s tenure with the Toronto Raptors is certainly off to a historic start — and not in a good way.
Correct us if we’re wrong, but we don’t think many other NBA coaches have been named in a lawsuit before even coaching a single preseason game.
Yesterday, the news broke that Rajaković was one of the defendants named by the New York Knicks in a lawsuit filed this week in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The crux of the Knicks’ allegations stems from Toronto’s recruitment and hiring of Ikechukwu “Ike” Azotam, who allegedly transferred over a series of video files and team documents in order to help the team set up their new video department.
“To assist this novice coach in doing his job, Defendant Rajaković and the other
Raptors Defendants conspired to use Azotam’s position as a current Knicks insider to funnel
proprietary information to the Raptors to help them organize, plan, and structure the new coaching and video operations staff,” the lawsuit reads.
The NBA has yet to comment on the allegations, but you’d have to assume a response is coming, as well as the NBA launching their own investigation into the matter to some degree.
Reaction to the allegations has been mixed: some think it’s a serious violation of league policy, while others have claimed that the biggest mistake Azotam made in the process was allegedly getting caught by his former employer.
The Knicks themselves are searching for a series of damages in this legal victory, but it’s also worth wondering if the NBA itself will have its own series of punishments towards Toronto for the matter.
And if the league does decide to penalize Toronto, there are essentially three ways the league could target the team: fines, suspensions, or draft pick forfeiture. Let’s go through each of them to see what precedents are like in league history:
What type of fine could Toronto see?
NBA fines are typically sums of money that would mean a lot to your average citizen, but would hardly cause a dent to an NBA team themselves.
On Tuesday, Philadelphia 76ers’ James Harden was fined $100,000 for calling his team president Daryl Morey a liar and stating he’d never play for an organization run by Morey again at a recent Adidas event in China.
Harden’s fine was the maximum amount a team could levy against a player, but that’s not the same case for teams, who bide by a different set of rules.
The NBA once fined the Minnesota Timberwolves $3.5 million (as well as causing them to forfeit five first-round picks, eventually reduced to three) in 2000 for trying to circumvent the salary cap, but it’s hard to imagine the Raptors coming anywhere close to that number.
Another notable NBA fine was the $2.5 million former LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who was barred from the league for life and forced to sell his franchise after a recording of his racist comments surfaced back in 2014, but again, it’s hard to imagine Toronto getting something anywhere close to that. Sterling remains the only non-player in league history to receive a lifetime ban.
The biggest fine of the 2022-23 NBA season came to the Dallas Mavericks this past spring, when they were slapped with a $750,000 fine for essentially not putting their optimal lineup on the court in the midst of a play-in push during the final two games of the regular season, in order to prioritize their 2023 draft ranking.
The second-biggest team fine over the last two seasons came in 2021, when the Minnesota Timberwolves were fined $250,000 for organizing unregulated offseason workouts with members of their team practicing outside of their home market at a court in Miami owned by team part-owner Alex Rodriguez.
Still, these numbers really won’t have any sort of impact on a franchise as valuable as the Raptors in comparison to the massive amounts they spend on player salaries.
For comparison’s sake, they’ll be paying a little over $2 million to 37-year-old veteran signing Garrett Temple, who played just 162 minutes in 2022-23 for the New Orleans Pelicans. No matter what sort of fine the NBA could send to Toronto, it’d still likely be less than their average salary towards the 15th player on the roster.
Would the Raptors see any suspensions?
There isn’t much precedent for major suspensions handed out by the league to non-players across the NBA.
The biggest coaching scandal of 2022-23 came when allegations surfaced about then- Boston Celtics coach Ime Udoka, and his alleged relationship with a member of the team’s staff. But while Udoka sat out the entirety of the season, he was suspended by his own team, not the league.
It wasn’t a firing, per se, but it was effective as such, with Udoka departing for the Houston Rockets this summer after the Celtics offered then-interim head coach Joe Mazzulla the full-time role midway through last season.
Only two non-players in NBA history have been suspended for more than half a season — but less than a lifetime ban — former Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver and Golden State Warriors owner Mark Stevens.
Banned for the entire 2022-23 season, Sarver eventually sold the Suns in 2022 after allegations of racism and sexism from a string of former employees, while Stevens was barred from the Warriors for a season after shoving Raptors guard Kyle Lowry in the 2019 NBA Finals while sitting courtside.
That being said, team video staff usually aren’t at the centre of lawsuits either, so it’s hard to gauge exactly how the NBA might rule here if they do get involved.
What about draft pick forfeiture?
In 2023, the Philadelphia 76ers and Chicago Bulls each forfeited a second-round pick due to violating rules governing free agency discussions, while the Milwaukee Bucks and Miami Heat faced the same issues a year prior. The 76ers were docked a pair of second-round picks for two violations, while the three other teams had to forfeit one second-round pick each.
While it happened in consecutive years, they were the first four forfeited picks since 2004, with the league going nearly two decades between forfeited picks.
Draft pick forfeiture is often used in addition to a fine, but has been restricted to second-round picks in each of the last four cases it’s been applied.
Toronto is already without their 2024 second-round pick as it was sent to Memphis as part of a Marc Gasol trade, and will be without their 2024 pick unless it’s in the top six of the draft as part of their trade for Jakob Poeltl. They’re also without their 2025 second-round pick as a result of the Poeltl trade, meaning the first second-round pick they could be docked is their 2026 pick.
In any case, we should get answers in the coming months over how exactly the league chooses to handle this matter.
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