If you follow the NBA at all, you undoubtedly have heard the conversation regarding load management, and its impact on the NBA as a whole.
Some will argue it robs fans of seeing their star players at the games they attend with their hard earned money. Others will say it’s simply the cost of doing business when winning basketball games is involved.
I would argue it’s just teams playing chess instead of checkers with a rule that the NBA has historically been weak on enforcing, with Spurs coach Greg Popovich being the guy who changed the game in this regard.
The Orgins of load management versus where it is now:
In 2012, coach Pop signed under the DNP ( did not play ) reason for his best three players at the time missing the game as ” old “, not any broken bones or torn tendons, just men being old.
Then NBA commissioner, David Stern, fined the Spurs a pretty mild two-hundred fifty thousand dollars for this act.
That’s not a lot of money for an NBA franchise that generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year, so naturally the small punishment has given other teams the indirect green light to do the same.
In Pop’s defense, Tony Parker and Manu Ginóbili both almost never stopped playing basketball after the NBA season, often doing FIBA and other summer tournaments. Therefore resting them made logical sense at the time.
Pop himself points out that his seemingly logical move as been used as an excuse for load management, even decrying the trend all together, and arguing what he did isn’t what teams do today.
“It’s become kind of silly, actually. I didn’t do any kind of load management,”
Greg Popovich on the ” grandfather of load management ” label
Now obviously what he did is load management of course, but load managing three guys who were in the twilight of their career is not the same as like what the Clippers do with Kawhi for example.
If load management stopped at guys aged 35 and higher, and wasn’t happening to stars who are in their primes, I doubt this is the issue that it is today.
Pop is right overall though, his sensible act of minute watching some of his aging players, has been turned into blatant exploitation of the NBA resting rules.
