LAS VEGAS (AP) — The NBA Cup finalists had different styles in how they play. And how they spend.
Tuesday night's title game in Las Vegas between Milwaukee and Oklahoma City pitted a team in the Bucks that's over the NBA's second apron — a threshold that, once exceeded, limits ways that teams can trade for or sign players — and a team in the Thunder below the first apron.
In NBA Commissioner Adam Silver's eyes, that might be fitting.
“I think it's great for the new (collective bargaining agreement),” Silver said Tuesday in a meeting with reporters before the NBA Cup title game , which Milwaukee won 97-81. “At the same time, there is a correlation between success on the floor and spending — and that’s the reason behind the second apron. We're not trying to make any secret out of it.”
The aprons are certainly going to limit how some teams make trades in the coming months. Earlier this season, when Minnesota and New York were trying to finalize the trade that sent Karl-Anthony Towns to the Knicks, Timberwolves basketball operations president Tim Connelly said the new CBA rules were complex to navigate.
“The new rules … some of the consequences are unintended, quite frankly,” Connelly said this fall. “I don’t know if anyone intended to make it this challenging to make moves, to make trades when you’re above certain aprons.”
Silver reiterated that the league knew what some of the new challenges would be.
“I understand the frustration of some of the general managers because particularly if you go over the apron, we’ve cut down on your flexibility,” Silver said Tuesday. “But that was the very intent of the second apron and with the goal being to have a better distribution of star talent around the league. And I think we’ve been successful in doing that.”
It's the league's stance that big-market and big-spending teams can win, and smaller-market and lesser-spending teams can do the same. Milwaukee is one of four teams currently over the second apron, along with Boston, Phoenix and Minnesota.
“There's many different ways to win,” Silver said.
The NBA Cup is coming back next season. The question is if the NBA Cup is coming back to Las Vegas.
The NBA's new broadcast agreements begin next season, and one of the league's new partners — Amazon — will be covering the knockout round of the tournament. But there's been no decision on where the 2025 title game will be played.
“There has been some interest expressed by teams in playing in the home markets,” Silver said. “It’s complicated enough scheduling a neutral site. I’m not against playing in our markets.
He said the question to figure out is how it would work a scheduling standpoint. There's a flip side of the coin, that being the league has liked how the first two years of the event have been received in Las Vegas.
“You start to build in tradition, you have a lot of fans who can circle these dates on their calendar and plan to come to Las Vegas, plan a holiday around it,” Silver said. "I think the teams are on both sides. I think they like the idea of winning that opportunity to play at home. But then you’ve got to move tickets very short term. We have some experience doing that in the playoffs, but this is a little bit different.”
But if Bucks coach Doc Rivers gets a vote, it'd stay in Vegas.
“Right here. Right here,” Rivers said after his team won the title Tuesday night. “Listen, I was proven wrong in a very good way. I was worried that if a (Los Angeles) team wasn't in the Cup we couldn't get enough people in the crowd. And the people from Las Vegas showed up. It was packed today and that's huge — not only for Vegas, but for the league.”
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Milwaukee Bucks center Brook Lopez, front left, looks to shoot against Atlanta Hawks guard Trae Young, front right, during the second half of a semifinal game in the NBA Cup basketball tournament Saturday, Dec. 14, 2024, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Ian Maule)
Houston Rockets forward Dillon Brooks (9) and Oklahoma City Thunder guard Luguentz Dort (5) contest for a rebound during the second half of a semifinal game in the NBA Cup basketball tournament Saturday, Dec. 14, 2024, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Ian Maule)
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. government will pay nearly $116 million to resolve lawsuits brought by more than 100 women who say they were abused or mistreated at a now-shuttered federal prison in California that was known as the “rape club” because of rampant staff-on-inmate sexual misconduct.
Under settlements approved Tuesday, the Justice Department will pay an average of about $1.1 million to each of 103 women who sued the Bureau of Prisons over their treatment at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California.
The agreements were finalized the same day a federal judge gave preliminary approval to a settlement in a separate class-action lawsuit that requires the Bureau of Prisons to open some facilities to a court-appointed monitor and publicly acknowledge abuse at FCI Dublin.
“We were sentenced to prison, we were not sentenced to be assaulted and abused,” lawsuit plaintiff and former Dublin prisoner Aimee Chavira said.
“I hope this settlement will help survivors, like me, as they begin to heal – but money will not repair the harm that BOP did to us, or free survivors who continue to suffer in prison, or bring back survivors who were deported and separated from their families," Chavira said.
The Bureau of Prisons acknowledged the settlements in a statement Tuesday.
The agency said it “strongly condemns all forms of sexually abusive behavior and takes seriously its duty to protect the individuals in our custody as well as maintain the safety of our employees and community."
Tuesday's settlements cover an initial wave of lawsuits seeking monetary compensation from the Bureau of Prisons after former warden Ray Garcia and other employees at FCI Dublin went to prison for sexually abusing inmates. Subsequent lawsuits have yet to be resolved.
The Bureau of Prisons and lawyers for the plaintiffs said individual settlement amounts were decided through a third-party process that included in-depth interviews with each woman.
An AP investigation found a culture of abuse and cover-ups that had persisted for years at the prison. That reporting led to increased scrutiny from Congress and pledges from the Bureau of Prisons that it would fix problems and change the culture at the prison.
The lawsuits describe a “pervasive culture of sexual misconduct and retaliation” and allege that the Bureau of Prisons “deliberately ignored alarming warning signs and sex abuse allegations” at the low-security facility about 21 miles (34 kilometers) east of Oakland.
They were filed by individual plaintiffs with the assistance of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Dublin Prison Solidarity Coalition, the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund and other groups.
The plaintiffs included a transgender former inmate who accused Garcia of molesting him and forcing him to touch Garcia's genitals in a recreation area that was out of view of surveillance cameras. Later, the inmate said, Garcia brought him drugs in an attempt to keep him quiet.
Another plaintiff alleged that her supervisor on the prison's recycling crew, Ross Klinger, had sexual intercourse with her in a storage container, contacted her via email and Snapchat and took her to a motel for sex twice after she was released to a halfway house.
Another plaintiff said a safety administrator, John Bellhouse, forced himself on her as he put his foot against his office door to trap her inside. When she reported the abuse to an internal prison investigator, she said he replied, “If it’s not on camera then you’re beat.”
Since 2021, at least eight FCI Dublin employees have been charged with sexually abusing inmates. Five pleaded guilty. Two were convicted at trial. Another case is pending.
Garcia was convicted in 2022 of abusing three inmates and is serving a 70-month prison sentence. Klinger pleaded guilty to abusing at least two inmates and was sentenced to five years of supervised release. Bellhouse was convicted of sexually abusing two inmates and is serving a 63-month prison sentence.
Some inmates who alleged abuse at FCI Dublin say they have been the victims of similar misconduct at other institutions, and the AP has found multiple arrests and convictions of Bureau of Prisons staff members for sexually abusing prisoners at other federal lockups.
“It was impossible for survivors to escape the culture of abuse that permeated FCI Dublin,” plaintiffs' lawyer Deborah Golden said. “No one was safe. Even those who weren’t assaulted lived in daily terror that it might happen to them at any moment.”
She described the trauma suffered by FCI Dublin's victims as “a searing indictment of our entire prison system’s failure to confront its longstanding abuse crisis” and said the settlements “sound an urgent alarm to policymakers and politicians” to make sure it doesn't happen again.
In July, President Joe Biden signed a law strengthening oversight of the agency after AP reporting spotlighted its many flaws.
In settling the class-action lawsuit, the Bureau of Prisons and plaintiffs' lawyers filed a proposed consent decree calling for a variety of reforms, including a monitor to scrutinize the treatment of nearly 500 ex-Dublin prisoners now housed at more than a dozen federal lockups across the U.S.
Also under that agreement, agency director Colette Peters “will issue a formal, public acknowledgement to victims of staff sexual abuse at FCI Dublin” as part of the settlement.
The Bureau of Prisons announced Dec. 5 that it was permanently shutting down FCI Dublin after a security and infrastructure assessment following its temporary closure in April.
The Bureau of Prisons said in a statement that it agreed to “the substantive terms of a proposed settlement to resolve all injunctive claims” in the class-action lawsuit and that “the decision to permanently close (FCI Dublin) is not a result of the agreement.”
FILE - The seal of the Department of Justice is pictured, Aug. 1, 2023, in Washington. The U.S. government will pay nearly $116 million to resolve lawsuits brought by more than 100 women who say they were abused or mistreated at a now-shuttered federal prison in California that was known as the “rape club” because of rampant staff-on-inmate sexual misconduct. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
FILE - The Federal Correctional Institution stands in Dublin, Calif., Dec. 5, 2022. The U.S. government will pay nearly $116 million to resolve lawsuits brought by more than 100 women who say they were abused or mistreated at a now-shuttered federal prison in California that was known as the “rape club” because of rampant staff-on-inmate sexual misconduct. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
