The NBA’s interminable debate about “load management,” the practice of teams resting healthy players to preserve them for the balance of an 82-game season and the playoffs, is a rare one. It’s rare because, in an increasingly vapid world of sports hootin’ and hollerin’, everyone is making fair points.
The San Antonio Spurs were making a fair point when they sent four aging stars home before a road game in 2012. Coach Gregg Popovich angled to keep them fresh while more or less throwing away a big-time regular season game against the Miami Heat, whom his team would later play in that year’s NBA Finals. Then-commissioner David Stern was making a fair point when he fined the Spurs $250,000 under a rule against “resting players in a manner contrary to the best interests of the NBA,” which the Spurs did by making a premier game became much less interesting. But the practice has persisted and taken on its semi-official label, and the debate has gone on, too, about whether it’s OK for teams to tactically retreat from regular season games in the name of self-preservation. The NBA has hit teams with a few more fines and threats of fines, but loads have continued to be managed. If you watch a team that is playing two games in two days, you will likely see at least one of its best players in street clothes.
Load management is no longer new, but the public conversation about it has hit a flashpoint over the past few weeks. Kevin Durant and Stan Van Gundy wondered in an amusing Twitter exchange about why hamstring and groin injuries seem so prevalent right now despite the emphasis on rest and improvements in sport science. A video went viral of a young Miami Heat fan, holding a sign that said he’d flown more than 4,000 miles to see Jimmy Butler play, learning that Butler would not play that night. (The Heat ruled Butler out with an injury, not as a load management case. Sometimes, that line blurs.) Nikola Jokic sat out a game against Giannis Antetokounmpo, denying fans a chance to see the two players who have won the past four MVP awards go head-to-head. Former players who are now commentators weighed in as well. Richard Jefferson spoke passionately on ESPN about how bummed he would’ve been, as a kid, if the legendary David Robinson had sat out a game Jefferson attended. Charles Barkley bemoaned the state of things with athletes making $40 or $50 million yet acting “like they’re steel mill workers.” Steph Curry wants people to know that players themselves don’t push to rest. Steve Kerr wants the season to shrink from 82 games to 72. “That creates enough rest where we don’t have to have some of these crazy situations. I think you’d see way fewer games missed from players,” Curry’s coach argues.
Load management has gone quite well for some championship teams, including Curry and Kerr’s Golden State Warriors. It’s intuitive that resting players to avoid back-to-back appearances would reduce injuries, after all, and it’s not hard to find successful anecdotes. But NBA injury data does not show the relationship panning out across the league, and load management might trouble teams in other ways, like by denying their best lineups a chance to build comfort and cohesion. The Los Angeles Clippers have load-managed the crap out of stars Kawhi Leonard and Paul George since signing both of them in 2019, and it hasn’t gotten them to 50 regular season wins or a Finals appearance. (Leonard missed last season while recovering from an ACL tear.) The team is hovering a few games above .500 with a below-average offensive rating this year. The Clippers built their team with load management in mind. The plan hasn’t worked yet.
It’s a tense topic at a tense time. Load management’s effectiveness is uncertain, for one thing. For another, it taps into big questions about what sports fans deserve to expect from players and teams. The only obvious truths are that a lot of people are unhappy about the emergent status quo, and that the NBA’s watchability is worse when the best players—for whatever reason—aren’t playing. Something should give, and the NBA’s league office will probably have to be the spearhead.
The NBA is an anomaly in the star-sitting game. NFL stars suit up for every game if they’re healthy, with the rare exception of final-week games if a team has locked in a playoff seed. Major League Baseball’s best players get scheduled off days in a 162-game grind but often play well into the 150s. The NHL matches the NBA’s 82-game schedule, on a similar timeline, and has nothing like load management. The best players appearing in the vast majority of games, with few or no planned absences, is the norm.
But NBA teams and players have reasons to be cautious. The sport has culturally devalued its regular season with endless discourse about individual player and team greatness that focuses overwhelmingly on the playoffs. Load management has furthered that dynamic. The postseason should be the ultimate aim point for any basketball operations staff, and load management fits into it. But basketball has also evolved into something different from the sport Barkley (who last played in 2000) and even Jefferson (2018) played. As longtime NBA journalist Mike Prada retorted to Jefferson, the game has spaced out and put a premium on fast, tiring movements that the old guard didn’t have to perform nearly as often. Combined with a never-ending amateur scene that puts heavy wear and tear on players before they even get to the NBA, the league’s modern style of play is a meat grinder. Consider a player like Jokic, a 6-foot-11 center who can dribble and make shots from anywhere. Or consider Curry, who can (and will) pull up from just inside the halfcourt logo and drop a devastating 3-pointer on a team that doesn’t guard him closely from distance. Consider that 3-point attempts have more than doubled this century, and that a more spread-out sport means more area for everyone to cover, dozens of times per game. Today’s players are insanely fast, and they demand defenders to chase them around all night.
Jefferson’s story about what it meant to him as a boy that he got to watch Robinson was sweet. It’s nice that his childhood experience motivated him to put on a show, during his own career, for however many younger versions of himself were sitting in the nosebleeds watching him. But Robinson didn’t owe Jefferson that, nor do today’s players owe anyone anything, other than to fulfill the contracts they negotiated with their teams under a union-negotiated framework. Barkley is right that star players aren’t steel mill workers. But these rich entertainers are still workers with a right to look out for themselves. Some NBA fans have forgotten about their favorite players’ humanity over the years, and sometimes it has manifested in verbal abuse of a Black player base that too many fans believe should perform at their whim.
That lens—who owes what to whom—has underlined much of the discussion of load management. Players aren’t responsible for fans deciding to spend hard-earned dollars hoping to watch them play at an appointed time. Teams don’t owe refunds when the MVP isn’t in the lineup. But any discussion about what’s owed and honorable misses a point: Load management isn’t about morality. It’s about business, as teams think about the playoffs, players collect a full paycheck while skipping games, and fans react as they choose.
The NBA exists to make money by entertaining. Every dollar Adam Silver makes, like every dollar LeBron James makes, comes from the same seed. Millions of people are captivated enough with the NBA to watch it on TV or buy a ticket (and then maybe to buy a jersey or a hot dog), when they could be watching thousands of other things or going outside and touching grass. When stars don’t play, grass gets more appealing.
It’s inarguable that the NBA’s status quo—some stars frequently injured, others sitting out lots of games as a preventive measure—is bad for the league’s foundation as an entertainment product. Imagine that you, like me, are a casual NBA fan who watches the Finals and a decent number of playoff games. You’ll watch nationally televised regular season games in bits and pieces, and you’ll attend a game every year or two. You may think about spending big money to watch the Warriors, one of the greatest teams ever, visit the mediocre team in your city (the Washington Wizards, for me). But you might not want to do that in advance, lest you get stuck paying inflated prices to watch Kerr run out a lineup in which Curry sits and Donte DiVincenzo replaces him. You might wait until the day of the game to buy a ticket, but by then you might have made other plans. It’s not personal, and it’s not a matter of any star player being in debt to some distant fan he’s never met. It’s just consumerism, and when it plays out that way, it cuts into the giant pot of money that NBA owners and players split up every season.
The problem compounds because of the NBA’s sport-specific value proposition. Basketball is a team game, but its commercial appeal is individualistic in a way that stands out from other sports. A team uses five players at a time. They’re not wearing helmets and masks. They’re in close proximity to fans. A great player can take over an entire game in a way even the greatest NFL quarterback cannot. This is a star-driven league putting on a star-driven show. No matter how much a person loves well-coached teams playing fundamental ball, there is nothing comparable to watching an elite basketball player decide a game belongs to him. That player is an artist, and the halfcourt is his canvas. Nobody pretends that the New Orleans Pelicans are in the same entertainment stratosphere without Zion Williamson as with him.
That’s why the NBA needs to course-correct in some way or another. Maybe it’s Kerr’s shorter-season idea. Maybe less basketball is not the answer, but the league instead needs to create an incentive structure that makes it worth teams’ and players’ while treating every game with seriousness. Players have a responsibility to fulfill their contracts, not to look out for the future of a sport that will use them up and eventually spit them out. Maybe the NBA needs to develop contracts that encourage maximal participation, just as college football bowl games could stop players from skipping out by paying them.
The league and its players aren’t the only parties in the relationship that don’t owe anyone anything special. A game without its most magical players is a game that’s less likely to reel someone in, whether that person is a little Richard Jefferson with a whole basketball life ahead of him or an indecisive 30-year-old deciding how to spend a Thursday night. A healthy sports league needs both.
