Earlier today, according to ESPN senior NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski, the league’s board of governors voted to approve restrictions on a phenomenon known as “load management” that has been the bane of basketball fans’ existence over the past half-decade or so.
Load management, for those who might not be attuned to basketball jargon, is the practice of holding ostensibly healthy players out of games they would otherwise start. The NBA instituted its first rules addressing gratuitous resting ahead of the 2017-18 season, after the Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors, who had appeared in their second consecutive NBA Finals against each other in June 2017, forced its hand by sitting star players to keep them fresh for the playoffs. The Cavs — led by the big three of Kyrie Irving, LeBron James, and Kevin Love — and the Warriors — boasting perhaps the greatest quartet ever assembled in Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, Draymond Green, and Klay Thompson — often benched all of their big-name talent at once during that year’s regular season.
The trend really caught on, though, during the 2019-2020 NBA season, during which Los Angeles Clippers forward Kawhi Leonard turned load management into his calling card. That year, Leonard played 37 minutes or more in a game only ten times and did not play in games on successive days; the year before, he had 13 37-minute-or-longer and zero back-to-back appearances (a four-quarter NBA game is 48 minutes, and there are 82 games in the regular season, though the league shortened its 2019-20 season to 72 games as a result of the coronavirus pandemic). This past season, of the 24 players named all-stars, only five had missed fewer than five games at the point of the mid-season contest.
The NBA’s new rules apply to its stars, which the league defines as players who have made either an All-Star or All-NBA team over the past three seasons. Wojnarowski reports the changes as follows:
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Teams must manage their roster to ensure that no more than one star player is unavailable for the same game. For example, the Boston Celtics would not be allowed to rest both Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum in the same game unless they are both injured.
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Teams must ensure that star players are available for national television and in-season tournament games.
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Teams must refrain from any long-term 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. Under that scenario, both the Washington Wizards and Portland Trail Blazers would’ve been investigated by the league after shutting down Bradley Beal (10 games) and Damian Lillard (11), respectively, at the end of last season.
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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.
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Teams must ensure that healthy players resting for a game are present and visible to fans.
The NBA will incorporate a fining system for teams that fail to meet these regulations, which include carve-outs for injury, personal reasons, “rare and unusual circumstances,” and the like.
While there are plenty of good reasons behind the phenomenon of load management — from increased emphasis on training and the improvements in medical science that have come along with it to the reality that a team can start off with a low seed in the playoffs and still make its way to the NBA Finals — the practice is bad for basketball.
Specifically, it’s bad for the fans who sustain the league. Imagine you’re a ten-year-old boy in the Orlando area who idolizes LeBron, whose Los Angeles Lakers play your hometown Magic only twice a season. For your birthday, your parents saved up and bought you tickets to a Lakers–Magic game — tickets that are far more expensive with LeBron in town than they would be otherwise. You get to the game, wearing your LeBron jersey, excited to watch your hero in action. But he’s not warming up on the court. He’s on the sidelines in street clothes.
We’re in the era of player empowerment in professional basketball, but the extent to which load management has taken over the NBA season is simply unfair to the fans. Not just the kids whose parents shell out their hard-earned money so they can see their favorite players in person, but all the people across the country who turn to sports as an escape from day-to-day problems. That the people on whom they rely for something a bit more than entertainment — and all sports fans can agree the relationship between a fan and their team is deeper than that between a viewer and a television show, for instance — would so often shirk the responsibility they have to their fans is a massive injustice, and the NBA’s move to fix it is a welcome change.
The NBA certainly has been far from perfect this decade. The league’s acquiescence to China has been nothing of a profile in courage, with its nadir coming in the form of a statement calling then–Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey’s since-deleted 2019 tweet supporting pro-democracy protesters “regrettable.” The league issued a separate, more strongly worded statement in Chinese, demonstrating its fealty to the Chinese Communist Party’s demands, and LeBron James said Morey was “not educated about the situation.” It’s worth noting this is the same LeBron James who has inspired countless internet jokes for seemingly being unable to make it past the first page of a book.
But the NBA has taken a step in the right direction with its decision to limit load management, especially since league commissioner Adam Silver said in February that he doesn’t “buy into” its existence being a problem. Even though the NBA has a long list of fixes to make, specifically regarding its relationship with China despite the country’s atrocious human-rights record (something about which the league purports to care a lot), it’s heartening to see it begin to recognize why it exists.
That’s the fans, and now fans all over the country will be have a better chance to watch the players they bought tickets to see.