For breaking the player participation policy against the Bucks, the Nets were fined $100,000.
The Brooklyn Nets were fined $100,000 by the NBA for breaking the player participation policy of the league during their loss to the Milwaukee Bucks on December 27. In the game against Milwaukee, head coach Jacque Vaughn chose not to start Spencer Dinwiddie, Cam Johnson, Nic Claxton, or Dorian Finney-Smith. The team’s status report indicated that they were resting and maintaining injuries.
The NBA said in a statement that it had “determined that four Nets rotation players, who did not participate in the game, could have played under the medical standard in the Player Participation Policy, which was adopted prior to this season” after conducting an investigation and reviewing the findings of an independent physician. “The Policy, which aims to encourage player participation in the NBA’s 82-game season, was broken by the organization’s actions.”
Not only did the Nets rest Dinwiddie, Johnson, Claxton, and Finney-Smith, but they also came under fire for benching their remaining rotation players toward the end of the game.
After the first quarter, Mikal Bridges, Cam Thomas, and Royce O’Neale were all benched. Dennis Smith Jr. and Day’Ron Sharpe were not used by head coach Jacque Vaughn in the fourth quarter, even though the team was behind by eight points at the start of the game. In the frame, the Bucks defeated the Nets 44–30 while Brooklyn used a lineup made up of G-League players.
Vaughn stated he didn’t want to play Bridges when questioned about the choice, and O’Neale and Thomas played for extended periods of time after doing so the night before against the Detroit Pistons.
The coach retorted, “My thought was getting a feel and pulse of the game.” “After Mikal played for forty minutes the previous evening, I reasoned that it wouldn’t be prudent for me to keep going in the same direction and have him play for forty minutes again. Throughout the game, you have those choices. In the first quarter, I ran Mikal, Royce, and Cam for quite a while. I simply imagined that at the end of the evening, I didn’t want to see them for forty minutes again. That’s essentially the essence of the matter.
Vaughn did not address the fact that Thomas and O’Neale played 23 and 15 minutes, respectively, while Bridges played 40 minutes against Detroit.
Having not missed a game since high school, Bridges has the longest active games played streak in the NBA. Prior to the Milwaukee match, Vaughn acknowledged that the forward play was influenced by the streak.
Bridges disagreed, though, and expressed his dissatisfaction with the team’s choice to rest the majority of the rotation. Since the Milwaukee fiasco, the Nets have dropped four straight games, prolonging a losing streak that has seen them drop ten of twelve games.
