How NBA fines turn bad moments into good deeds

What’s the afterlife of an NBA fine? After the pushing and shoving, the bursts of colourful language and complaints about officiating or the league that skew a little too public, where does the money go?

You’d be forgiven if, in the moment, you give more thought to what a potential suspension for your team’s favorite superstar means for the competitive trajectory of your team, than what a fine means to the finances of said player. But it turns out the liquidity of bad decisions goes a long way toward doing a little good.

“Not many people know that when players get fined, 50% goes to NBA Cares, and then the other [half] goes to our foundation,” Erika Swilley, Executive Director of the NBPA Foundation, says.

The NBPA Foundation was started in 1997 as a philanthropic arm of the NBPA and aims to support athletes’ charitable efforts through direct funding and education. They also operate as a valuable cheerleader for those efforts, communicating the work athletes do in order to maximize their impact. But part of that maximization is also financially tangible — the NBPA Foundation launched a grant-matching program in 2015.

Through the model, current players donate to nonprofits of their choosing and can apply to the PA for up to $25,000 per season (or per year) to match those donations. Some players hit the $25k target with one donation, others choose to spread it around through multiple donations to a variety of nonprofits. Retired players with a minimum of three years of service in the NBA can apply for matching grants up to $15,000. Applications are approved on a rolling basis, and between May and September of this year the PA’s Foundation approved 124 grants, totaling over $2 million. It all came from player fines.

“There’s not always a negative connotation with the fine money,” Swilley stresses. “Important work is being done.”

Indeed, a large component of the PA’s Foundation — and Swilley’s role — is education for its members and for the league’s fans. For fans, it’s understanding that fine money, while not necessarily emerging from the most pragmatic intentions on the floor, is very carefully considered by the PA’s Foundation and NBA Cares in its distribution. What starts as a punishment for hotheadedness is being used for good.

The NBPA Foundation operates on five main pillars:

1. Education
2. Health and wellness
3. Humanitarian relief (which includes disaster relief)
4. Youth sports
5. Social justice and civic engagement

The PA maintains a detailed database for where and how fine money is deployed through these pillars, and where it’s most impactful — or goes the furthest.

A less data-driven metric of success, but one Swilley considers as crucial, is getting athletes started on their philanthropic journeys.

“These players have a very unique platform to give back and help others,” Swilley says, “getting them to understand how they can tap into their unique platform and really make a difference in the communities in which they play and they’re from, I would say is success for us.”

For that, the interest needs to be genuine. Swilley doesn’t want athletes just “checking a box” for philanthropy because those efforts likely won’t be lasting, or as impactful. Her job with the PA, and what she’s been most passionate about over her 20-year career in the NBA and WNBA, is getting to know athletes as people to help them “connect the dots” of their interests and potential community involvement.

“I always tell them, pick something that’s a lived experience that you can work for and champion and tell that story. Because if you’re just picking literacy because it sounds good, then there’s never going to be that passion there,” Swilley says. “It’s hard for them to see how some of their lived experiences can then translate into community work for them.”

A big part of the learning process for athletes in athlete-driven philanthropy is age. A fact often willfully overlooked is how young players entering the NBA are, and as Swilley notes, “they don’t always know what they don’t know.”

Kevin Huerter, whose own foundation received an NBPA matching grant this past May, made a mental note of the matching program back in his second season in Atlanta. He knew that he eventually wanted to start a foundation and give back to the Capital Region, the metropolitan area surrounding Albany, New York, where he’s from, but didn’t have the necessary time and security to get it off the ground until a few years ago.

“Your head is spinning a little bit from being in the NBA your first two to three years, all you’re trying to do is make it,” Huerter recalls. “It feels like you make it once you get to the NBA, [but] you really make the once you get to your second contract, or sometimes second team. That’s where you’re able to take a deep breath and start to give back.”

Image courtesy of The Kevin Huerter Foundation

The Kevin Huerter Foundation is operating in its third year, and has expanded into events in the community in the last two. Its main fundraising venture comes from a summer golf tournament Huerter hosts in Albany, but the PA’s matching program enabled Huerter and his foundation to host a back-to-school giveaway with backpacks and school supplies, a Thanksgiving turkey drive, and a winter coat and clothing drive.

In addition, all of Huerter’s community initiatives include sports equipment. As someone who grew up attending basketball camps, volunteered for sports camps in his community, and whose family was and is (he has siblings who play sports college, his dad coached basketball) very involved in athletics, Huerter credits sports with many of his earliest opportunities. He wants other kids to have the same conduits to success that he did.

“It started for me locally. At some point I do hope to branch out further than the Capital Region, but I’ve always felt so much support from the region,” Huerter says, noting “there’s not a lot of pro athletes that come from where I’m from.”

The community-centered and passion-specific aim Huerter set out with — getting sports equipment and opportunities through sports to kids in the Capital Region — is what Swilley stresses to athletes about connecting the dots from their own lived experience to their charitable endeavor of choice, and what’s made Huerter’s foundation as impactful as it is.

Another influence Huerter and Swilley credit in helping young athletes find their fit in community involvement, beyond the PA’s perfectly low-key yearly meetings (“They catch us on the road in different cities and we meet in a banquet room in a hotel and we just kind of talk,” Huerter says. “A couple members from the PA come out, the whole team is there”) are veterans.

“When I started my career in Atlanta, my vets were Vince Carter, Kent Bazemore, DeAndre’ Bembry, at the time they had started their own foundations,” Huerter says, remembering Bazemore as particularly engaged in the community every year. When Huerter was traded to the Kings, his vet and “sounding board” became Harrison Barnes.

“He’s someone who’s involved in so much. He was on the board of the PA, Secretary Treasurer, he’s involved in his community, he’s involved in different things politically. Harrison is just so well rounded as a professional athlete that he was someone — unfortunately he’s moved on, he’s with Spurs now — but he’s someone that we spoke a lot about a lot of different things off the court,” Huerter says.

“If you do have the right veterans on your team that have been in the league for a while and are doing the right things, if you’re observant, you start to see what other guys do. How they go about their business off the court, both in the financial world and philanthropy world,” he continues.

Of his own role as a would-be veteran (Huerter chuckles at the premature aging but admits he’s at that status now), he says he hopes some of his younger teammates start to ask some questions — or at least commit to playing in his foundation’s golf tournament.

“But,” he pauses thoughtfully, “a lot of that is a young guy’s got to be willing to ask those questions, and willing to learn and want to learn. It takes a couple of years to get there. But I’m definitely willing to help the next guy if they want to be helped.”

Image courtesy of The Kevin Huerter Foundation

The ecosystem for player fines is robust. There are upwards of four NBA games being played on any given night and the league is a competitive one. It’s no athlete’s intent to go out and get fined and certainly, a majority don’t (looking at you, consummate pro, career technical foul-less, kind human, but admittedly low fundraiser towards “on-court philanthropy”, Mike Conley). But simply due to the sheer volume and frequency with which they’re thrown into the heat of competition, tempers boiling over is going to happen. What’s more of a delicate ecosystem are all the initiatives — grassroots, community, philanthropic — supported by said fines. This ecosystem needs time to be nurtured, grown and developed, given that it’s inextricably tied to player success and longevity.

It feels a bit like a paradox, this one thing fuelled by bravado, even ego, supporting something selfless and quiet, necessarily humble. Still, the effects are crystal clear — fines turned tender and in turn, put to work.