'He's a Healthy Scratch.'

And that'll cost ya 100 grand

Thanks for reading The Dope.

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The Utah Jazz have been trying to play keep-away with one of their best guys, Lauri Markkanen, and I think I know why. Heading into Wednesday’s action, the Jazz were 15-50 on the season, the second-worst record in the NBA, and are in fact the only team in the league to already have been eliminated from the playoffs, which do not begin for more than a month.

I’m saying they stink.

Anyway, you knew that if you follow the league. But under the NBA’s rules about not pissing off their fans, even the dregs are supposed to run their best players out there on a pretty regular basis, and those rules are not suspended or amended in any way based on stinkage.

So the Jazz on Wednesday were fined $100,000 for sitting Laui Markkanen in, let’s see here, nine straight games. That’s a pretty bold act of defiance by Utah — and very understandable, given their circumstances. Still, the NBA doesn’t really work that way.

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Despite being in the midst of his eighth season in the league, Markkanen is still only 27 years old. The Finland native has had a garden variety of injuries through the years — hamstring, hip, shoulder, leg, hand, etc. — and has played more than 60 games in a season only three times, but he is a remarkably dependable scorer and rebounder when he’s on the floor. Utah picked him up three years ago, and in his first season with the Jazz he became an All-Star.

That is actually working against the franchise right now. The league’s rules about sitting out of games are especially stringent when it comes to “star players,” whom the NBA defines as anyone who has made the All-Star Game over the course of the past three seasons.

Markkanen, an All-Star in the 2022-23 campaign, still qualifies. So even in a Utah season that was already totally lost way back on Dec. 1 when it fell to 4-16, the team cannot “rest” Markkanen even if the intent is to preserve its versatile 7-footer for his NBA future — that is, to live to fight another year.

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The club went with “low back — injury management” as its reason for sitting Markkanen nine straight times, though it was apparently widely understood that he wasn’t injured. And let’s be honest: Neither you nor I knew that any of this was even happening.

That’s because we are not paying the slightest attention to the inner workings of the team with the worst record in the Western Conference. It’s not exactly the Miami Heat scheduling a Shaq sit-down back in the day, put it that way.

The Jazz absorbed the $100,000 fine. Under league rules, the penalty grows to $250,000 for a second offense and $1.25 million for a third, and so on Wednesday evening in Memphis, the Jazz announced that Markkanen was suddenly available to play against the Grizzlies. Lauri scored 14 points in 28 minutes. The Jazz lost by seven.

He’s back! And that should do it — that should fix the NBA’s ratings decline, in which viewership has been down about 5% for most of the regular season. Problem solved. All they had to do was get the kid in Utah on the floor.

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