Unlike most ethics quizzes, I’ve made up my mind about this incident, but I acknowledge that others may feel differently and have good reasons—maybe—to do so. I hate it, however.
The NBA’s LA. Clippers and Chick-fil-A collaborated on a promotion that if a player on an opposing team misses two consecutive free-throw attempts, fans will win a free Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich. And thus it was that when Houston Rockets’ Boban Marjanovic went to the free-throw with 4:44 to play in the fourth and final quarter of the Rockets’ game against the Clippers with his team leading 105-97 (not an insuperable margin), he had a twinkle in his eye. He missed his first shot, and the Clipper fans stared cheering—for chicken. Marjanovic looked around, pointed at himself, and bounced his shot off the basket rim. The fans went wild, and Marjanovic seemed to revel in his failure.
Yecchh.
…not that I want to influence you, now.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz on this Patriots Day (in Boston) is…
“Was it ethical or unethical for Marjanovic to tank his free throw so the fans could get a free sandwich?”
Just listen to those idiots in the broadcast booth…
I absolutely think it was unethical; in fact, the NBA and his team should fine and suspend Marjanovic. But this is emblematic of why I detest pro basketball only slightly less passionately than I do the NFL. The sport has no integrity. Regular season games are virtually meaningless. Players literally play about 60% harder during the play-offs: you can see it.
This episode was disgusting, and unethical in more ways than one:
1. Basing any promotion on a negative occurring is unethical on its face, an example of how gambling has corrupted sports generally. Giving out a free sandwich if a player does something good is a benign incentive. Bad performances in sport, however, are easily rigged. The Clippers and Chick-fil-A were asking for this to happen, which means the Clippers were encouraging fans to root for less than honest efforts by professional athletes.
2. The free throws mattered, not that Marjanovic would be any less obligated to try to sink them if his team was decisively ahead (or behind). His actions literally meant that he endorses the heirarchy that free sandwiches are more important than basketball.
3. He’s not paid to be a “man of the people.” He’s paid to play basketball well, and to do that to the best of his ability, all the time, in every game.
Oh, I know what his defense will be, and that of his fans. He was trying to make both shots, but he was just trolling the opposing team’s fans. If he missed, which the player does about 30% of the time, he’d be a hero. If he made the last shot, it would be an epic troll: raising the fans’ hopes and dashing them with a smirk. He couldn’t lose!
Don’t believe it.
Worse, the player and his fans might default to a rationalization, and there are a passel of ’em that fit, like 3. Consequentialism, or “It Worked Out for the Best,” 8. The Trivial Trap (“No harm no foul!”), 13. The Saint’s Excuse: “It’s for a good cause,” 13A. The Road To Hell, or “I meant well” (“I didn’t mean any harm!”), 15. The Futility Illusion: “If I don’t do it, somebody else will,” 22. The Comparative Virtue Excuse: “There are worse things,”23. The Dealer’s Excuse. or “I’m just giving the people what they want!,”33. The Management Shrug: “Don’t sweat the small stuff!,”. 36. Victim Blindness, or “They/He/She/ You should have seen it coming,” 38. The Miscreant’s Mulligan or “Give him/her/them/me a break!,” 41. The Evasive Tautology, or “It is what it is,”49. “Convenient Futility,” or “It wouldn’thave mattered if I had done the right thing,” 50. The Apathy Defense, or “Nobody Cares,” 52. The Hippie’s License, or “If it feels good, do it!,” 58. The Golden Rule Mutation, or “I’m all right with it!,” 59. The Ironic Rationalization, or “It’s The Right Thing To Do,” and 63, Yoo’s Rationalization or “It isn’t what it is.”
Invalid all.
I wish Chic-fil-A had the guts to refuse to make good on the stunt, announcing that because its promotion required the player to make a good faith effort to sink the foul throws, the conditions required for the sandwich giveaway had not been met, That would be the right ethics lesson, but, unfortunately, a bad business choice.
___________
Pointer: Curmie
Ethics Alarms 
This is the entertainment business. Are you not entertained?
Same argument the producers of the TV quiz shows in the quiz show scandals made.
All pro sports are going to be the WWE in a few years. Maybe even politics if Idiocracy got it right and we’re lucky.
Haha. Reminds me of the Demolition Man, when Sandra Bullock’s character tells Sly Stone’s character:
“Your tone is quasi-facetious, but you do not realize that Taco Bell was the only restaurant to survive the franchise wars. Soooo…now all restaurants are Taco Bell.”
I agree fully, but will note there are occasions where missing a free throw is strategically advantageous due to how the clock starts or stops after a missed throw. This was certainly not such an incident with more than 4 minutes on the clock.
You are right, 100%. Incentives to not perform should be blocked by rule in any sports league and any such collaboration or promotion should be found in violation and sent to a competition and disciplinary committee.
Of course, no one will take this concern that seriously at this time because the stakes were near the lowest they could have been – but they should be taken seriously. Any good competition authority or compliance manager worth their salt is constantly using “game theory” to gain an advantage and tease things to their logical conclusion. What happens when Clippers work with Chick Fil A for a whole Free Food Day if their last opponent of the season blows a 12-pt 4th quarter that directly leads to giving the team the last spot in the playoffs or a better seeding? Then the only thing standing in the way of uncompetitive corruption is the ethics of the player on the court.
And wouldn’t it be interesting if missing those shots also made the point spread for a major gambler!
I kind of suspected that you might think a player who sets out to make the opposing team’s fans happy might be doing something wrong.
Especially when it is in direct contradiction to the interests of the franchise paying him to try to make every free throw…
If he was a mn of character, whch i doubt beecause few professional athletes are people of character (POC) he would go halfises with Chick Fil A. More specifically the franchise owners of the Chic fila who will have toeat this cost.
Of course chick file needs to consider its management team for promoting such a stunt, I was, a long time ago a Franchise owner for Quiznos. The corpration advertized, and mass mailed a coupons, for a free sandwich withthe purchase of a medium size drink. Which do you presume is the most expensive to produce. We, the franchise owners had to absorb the loss of the sandwhich price, not the corportation.
Q is quite the example of a franchise grinding all their independent owners into oblivion. I hope that was the worst they did to you.
I used to eat at their #2 store, way back when they hung their meats from the ceiling, with candles and six-pack carriers of sauce on every table.
I’m less sold than you are, Jack.
I think the problem was more the negative incentive than the player’s action, and that once that team put that incentive there, both the team and the advertising vendor had to assume that someone was going to do something like this.
I think that this kind of thing is indicative of marketing departments that have idiots working in them, which is thoroughly disappointing at that level. Marketing is about narrative. What’s the narrative? I’d love for someone to try to enunciate what the team was trying to do here – “We’re hoping the other team does poorly, and if they do, we’ll buy you chicken”?, “Maybe we can bribe someone into missing a couple of free throws by giving stuff away”?
All that said, and to allay the people thinking Chik-Fil-A was hard done by here: Promotions like that are insured. I run a couple of golf tournaments a year, and we’ll have promos where if someone hole-in-ones a particularly rough hole, they’ll win a truck. We partner with a local dealer, and a truck is sitting by the tees, but I haven’t bought a truck. I have insurance so that if someone does win a truck, one gets bought. And because I’ve picked a positive and very hard to do thing, so far it has not come up.
I’m less sold than you are, Jack.
Which is why I made it an ethics quiz.
The ethical move would have been for the player to make the shot, and buy every fan at the game a sandwich.
And he can afford it.
Bingo!
The Rockets are so terrible, none of their games get televised on any network. I’ve never seen that guy Boban Marjanovic actually playing in an NBA game. He’s big in television commercials though. I thought he was, at best, washed up and out of the league and reduced to being a goofball on television commercials. Hence, he’s a facsimile of a basketball player. I doubt he takes much of anything seriously. Why shouldn’t he miss those free throws? He’s a cartoon character.
Pro sports, and college sports are lost. They’ve sold their soul to become their own bookies. Pathetic. Have you seen the ads for an online/cell phone sports book is a joint venture with the NBPLA, that would be the players’ union? Nice. Don’t bother sayin’ it ain;t so, Joe.
Good to see Corbin Caroll is the bet365.com player of tonight’s Jackie Robinson 42 Cubs Diamondbacks game. Brilliant.
With the state of the economy and people’s finances, food probably is worth more than basketball. However, these are people who can afford NBA tickets, so the probably aren’t starving. Like shorting stocks, incentivizing failure will lead to people gaming the system. Failure is easy and if you reward it, people will do easy failure for rewards instead of hard success for less of a reward. What if Chick-Fil-A had offered 100,000 free sandwich coupons to the food pantries of the opposing team’s city? Just outright bribe your opponents to lose! What could go wrong?