NBA Fines Nets $100,000 for First Violation of Player Participation Policy

On Thursday, the NBA fined the Brooklyn Nets $100,000 for holding four rotation players out of their 144-122 loss to the Milwaukee Bucks last week.

The fine is the first such instance that a team has been docked under the NBA's new rules regarding resting players. Brooklyn (15-20) held Spencer Dinwiddie, Cam Johnson, Nic Claxton and Dorian Finney-Smith — who combine to average over 50 points per game — out on Dec. 27 against Milwaukee (24-10).

Last September, the league's board of governors voted to implement a new player participation policy (PPP), which sought to curtail teams from resting multiple players in the same game. At the time, commissioner Adam Silver said that the move was "a statement of a principle that if you're a healthy player in this league, that the expectation is that you're going to play."

Not only did the Nets rest the aforementioned quartet against the Bucks, but three players in that night's starting lineup — guard Cam Thomas and forwards Mikal Bridges and Royce O'Neale — played 12 minutes or fewer.

After the contest, Brooklyn head coach Jacque Vaughn told reporters that, with his group on the second night of a back-to-back, he "just envisioned that, at the end of the night, I didn't want them touching 40 minutes again."

However, the NBA fine came on Thursday nonetheless.

"What we’ve said is sitting four or five guys at one time is not that way," Joe Dumars, the league's executive vice president and head of basketball operations, told the Associated Press' Tim Reynolds. "So, if you want to get your players rest, there are ways to do this. But if you do it in a way where it becomes egregious in terms of sitting four or five guys at a time, that’s just not what we’re about in an 82-game league."