Give it a rest: NBA load management is here to stay

The NBA is fine with player rest, if teams will at least pretend the players are hurt –- and almost every player in the league is dealing with some nagging injury at all times. If the Clippers had said that Kawhi had back spasms, or “flu-like symptoms,” or the vague issue of “tendinitis,” no one would have batted an eye. In effect, teams and players are being punished for telling the truth about wanting to rest guys. Part of the problem is the term “load management,” an impersonal phrase that feels like it was work-shopped with a focus group. No one likes hearing a basketball team talk like a Silicon Valley company press release, which is also why Philadelphia’s embrace of “The Process” was so off-putting. We know the NBA is a business, but no one likes being constantly reminded of that.  

Old players still hate it. Michael Jordan used to tell his players in Charlotte, “You’re paid to play 82 games.” And he did play 82 games most years –- except for when he took almost two full seasons off at ages 30-31. Going away to play an entirely different sport for a year is the ultimate in load management. Besides, Jordan could gamble all night in Atlantic City and still drop 36 points in a playoff game the next day. That doesn’t mean it was a good idea, or that anyone else could have done it! The league’s attitude back then was certainly different, though. In 1990, the NBA fined the Lakers $25,000 for resting Magic and Kareem in the season finale, a game that had no impact on playoff seeding.

There’s an idea that old basketball players were tougher, and that resting is a bad idea, but that simply doesn’t hold up. Shaq regularly missed 15 games per year at the end of his time with the Lakers, and LA won titles anyway. Detroit's Isiah Thomas rarely took a game off, but his career was over at age 32. Charles Barkley played 82 games exactly once, in his rookie season. The Celtics' Larry Bird missed his entire age-32 season because of injuries -– in part because of a back injury suffered while building his mom’s driveway in 1985, which is clearly the antithesis of load management. If he’d simply gotten a little more rest (Bird averaged 40.6 minutes per game that season) -– or better yet, hired a contractor –- the legendary ‘86 Celtics might have repeated as champions. Do you want to see Kawhi Leonard play for 15 years? Then you must accept him missing 15 games a season.

ESPN's Trey Wingo is nostalgic for an era of cheap shot fouls and fist fights on the court, but obviously he likes everything tough. Maybe fans want to see a goon like Bill Laimbeer of the Pistons undercutting players on layups and hitting them when they aren’t looking; we think there’s a reason Zaza Pachulia is out of the league now. People also get nostalgic about not wearing seat belts and smoking in restaurants, so perhaps there’s a natural tendency to want things to be super-dangerous. If you watch footage of NBA games from the ‘80s, most of the backup centers look like unusually tall off-duty plumbers, so of course they’re tackling the guys who can actually jump. It’s not toughness, it’s desperation! When players are making $30 million per year, and no one is working a side job as a longshoreman, there’s a massive incentive to keep everyone healthy. After all, severely injured guys play in zero national TV games.

Still, the NBA should probably try to change the conversation on rest, if only so basketball fans aren’t having the same argument on Twitter every year. This season feels like deja vu: Once again, load management is controversial, the Knicks are firing their coach, and a superstar might leave his team in the summer (this year it’s Giannis). Our advice? Make up injuries, no matter how fake or medieval. Markelle Fultz's agent pioneered this last season, explaining his shooting woes were due to "thoracic outlet syndrome," a condition that's nearly impossible to diagnose and thus, impossible to dispute. Kevon Looney of the Warriors is currently out with a “neuropathic condition,” which is perfect because even the team doesn’t seem to know what it is. Next time Kawhi wants to rest on a televised game, Rivers should tell the media he has the vapours, and Paul George’s next rest day could be due to an imbalance of the humours. Twitter doctors could take a break from misdiagnosing injuries based on replays and speculate about PG-13’s levels of yellow and black bile. Fans would feel much better about superstars sitting out if they were worried they were struggling with Gottschalk’s Syndrome, a rare bone disorder that I just made up.

Load management is here to stay, and it’s time to stop pretending it’s an outrage. NBA players work very hard, as they’re happy to show you in their Instagram stories. And if we are going to criticize players for not winning titles or folding in the playoffs, we must accept that they’re going to rest in the regular season. After all, if we act like the regular season is meaningless when we talk about a star’s accomplishments, it’s no surprise that they start to feel that way too.