Managing Up
How the NBA is trying to Manage the Load
We’ll get back to football, I promise. You Americans. So pushy!
Just to ease you in, though, we can start with some plaudits for the NFL. There’s no competing with football when it comes to who has the most compelling regular season.
They get more people to watch every single game on their schedule than the other leagues can get to watch the World Series, Stanley Cup, or NBA Finals, and the gap isn’t small — roughly five million viewers.
Speaking of: the prize for least compelling regular season may well go to basketball, and recent developments suggest they’re aware of the problem.
New rules, announced last week, seek to address one of the funniest euphemisms in the NBA lexicon: Load Management.
For those fortunate enough not to know, Load Management is the shorthand for when a player skips a game for which he’s available, i.e. isn’t hurt.
A lot of people associate this most closely with one Kawhi Anthony Leonard, the two-way superstar who notoriously sits back-to-backs as a matter of policy and principle.
And as you might expect, people have opinions on that.
The case against, in short:
It ruins a fan’s night when they pay to see Kawhi and get Norm Powell instead (respect Norm, though)
It makes regular-season games uncompetitive
It hurts “the integrity of the game” (I go back and forth on what that phrasing actually means, but you get the idea)
It hurts the NBA as a product altogether
The case for, in medium:
It helps keep stars healthy for the playoffs
If the point is to win in the playoffs, why are we risking health for relatively meaningless regular-season games?
It helps keep stars healthy period (the argument effectively being: Hey, would you rather I miss five games a year, or forty?)
The product is hurt more by injuries than it is injury prevention
Who’s Managing Management?
Eight bullets in! Everybody still with me? Great.
Five more incoming. This is how the NBA plans to address what’s been a mounting trend across the league.
Here they are, with my approving commentary in brackets and italics! [Nice]
No more than one star player is unavailable for the same game [Cool]
Star players must be available for national TV and in-season tournament games [k]
Teams must refrain from any longterm shutdown — or near shutdown (when a star player stops participating in games or plays in a materially reduced role in circumstances affecting the integrity of the game) [Got it]
Teams must maintain a balance between the number of one-game absences for a star player in home games and road games, with a preference for those absences to happen in home games [kk]
Teams must ensure that healthy players resting for a game are present and visible to fans […? Fine]
These all sound reasonable, though I don’t relish dictating what a player should and shouldn’t do to preserve their own health and career.
To that point, though, I’m probably not even the thousandth writer to identify the obvious problem that isn’t being solved here, won’t be solved anytime soon, and can’t be solved without a profound come-to-Jesus (Shuttlesworth) moment from the league and its owners.
The schedule is too damn long!
82 is too many games. It’s too many games for the players and the hyper-athletic pace and style in which the game is now played. Load Management is a direct response to that.
It’s also too many games for fans to particularly care about regular-season results, especially when the best players aren’t on the court together as often as they should be.
What should be marquee matchups on national television get deflated before they even start. That’s what the NBA is trying to address here, but the bigger issue is way bigger. It’s structural.
They’re stuck between the leisurely 162 that makes baseball so pleasantly ever-present, where there’s always time to turn it around, and the 17 that makes every football game feel like it really matters, because each one does really matter.
Compounding matters, most of the league makes the playoffs. Teams with losing records regularly get in, and now with the play-in tournament — a mostly positive innovation, in my view — there are even more.
How can you convince a team they shouldn’t sleepwalk through the regular season when all you need to make a Finals run — ask the Heat — is not be one of the league’s ten worst teams?
As currently constituted, basketball’s 82 games don’t give them that baseball zen, where an almost totally uncontroversial degree of Load Management exists too.
And it gets them nowhere near football’s value by scarcity, where Load Management isn’t feasible unless or until you’ve locked up your playoff seed.
The Magic Number
Counterpoint! The NHL plays a very similar 82-game schedule, in a far more physical sport, and has no semblance of a Load Management problem that I can discern.
A fully healthy hockey roster is a rare thing indeed, though, and playoff basketball fortunes are somewhat uniquely dictated by star play, so maybe those aren’t as identical as they seem.
But I would understand if someone said something to the effect of: if these guys can handle the same schedule in a more dangerous sport, what are basketball teams/players complaining about?
It’s tough. And yet, I think I’m still on Team <82.
Problem is, you’re never gonna get the number of games down without taking a sizable hit on the money, and nobody’s signing up for a pay cut, least of all the owners. Can’t go fucking with the money.
But this version of the season isn’t working on a number of fronts, and some argue that cutting some games would (help) solve some of those issues. Others disagree, stridently.
I don’t know what the magic number is. I just don’t think it’s 82.
But those sorts of big questions are important for the NBA right now, whose reaction to the Load Management issues speak to — I think — how they see their wider positioning.
Actual basketball games are not high on the list of what drives the cultural resonance of the sport today.
They have a phenomenal pseudo-reality TV show vibe going with all the player movement. The stove is piping hot at all times, which has its drawbacks too, but still. Good problem.
They have by far the most widely recognizable personalities of any American sport, and by far the most of them. Big-time star power = Good problem.
Basketball matters in wider pop culture, from fashion to music. By leaps and bounds, it’s the most-followed league on both Instagram and TikTok. Good problems, one and all!
But the league knows they have a real issue when the games struggle to garner a commensurate audience.
Managing Load Management won’t fix that. But it might be a start.