The NBA has had enough — or at least its television partners have — and is cracking down on load management this season. Players must participate in at least 65 games to qualify for postseason awards, then there is the new Player Participation Policy limiting when stars can be rested.
Not so coincidentally, this urge to care about the regular season so much — echoed in a public relations push by the league saying there needs to be a culture among players of wanting to play in 82 games — came just as the league was negotiating a new national television/broadcast deal. NBA coaches and front office personnel understand this is a business, they understand the dynamics at play with the league’s push.
However, when Joe Dumars, the NBA VP of basketball operations, came out and said this week the NBA’s data shows load management does not work, that raised a few eyebrows. Dumars reportedly had previously discussed that study with NBA coaches during a meeting with them, emphasizing the league’s focus on getting stars into regular season games.
“Before, it was a given conclusion that the data showed that you had to rest players a certain amount, and that justified them sitting out,” Dumars said in a media conference call. “We’ve gotten more data, and it just doesn’t show that resting, sitting guys out correlates with lack of injuries, or fatigue, or anything like that. What it does show is maybe guys aren’t as efficient on the second night of a back-to-back.”
The reaction of NBA team personnel NBC Sports spoke with about this ranged from eye rolls and skepticism to the use of a word describing organic fertilizer from a male bovine.
A few coaches and front office analytics people spoke to Joe Vardon and Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic, expressing that same suspicion of the league’s study.
“It’s just PR,” one NBA coach told The Athletic, who was granted anonymity so that he could speak freely about the meeting with Dumars. “There are plenty of other studies that prove load management makes sense from an injury and recovery standpoint.”
“Like, if we’re all waiting for this to be evidence-based, and for the science to support it, we’ll be doing it 10 years from now,” the former sports science director said. “That’s how long it takes to get our research. And then the next research paper disproves it. So in elite sports, we’re early adopters, we can’t wait for science and research. We can use the concepts of base science and apply them. But if we wait for evidence, we’ve missed. We’re fired because we haven’t stayed ahead of the curve.”
That sentiment is not universal. Some GMs and coaches think their players need to have more of a focus on the regular season — Tyronn Lue and the Los Angeles Clippers are leading that charge, even if his players are not fully buying it. Of course coaches want all their players on the court for every game. Most of the players want to be out there as well. The vast majority of “load management” nights off come on orders from teams training and sports science staffs, who use specialized player tracking programs and equipment to monitor player fatigue. They see this as preventative — injuries are more likely to occur when muscles are fatigued and cannot support tendons and ligaments as well. The NBA has become a recovery league and teams take that seriously.
Even for coaches and others who want to see players on the court more, the idea that load management doesn’t work contradicts what the sports science people have been saying for years and what those coaches have seen. Have teams overused load management? Have stars been sat too much during the regular season? There’s a good argument to be made there. However, GMs and coaches know their job security often rests more on playoff performance than the first 82 games — ask Mike Budenholzer, who won a ring for the Bucks in 2021 and whose team won 58 games last season then was fired after a first-round exit — and getting their stars to the postseason healthy remains a top priority.
Don’t expect a public pushback from coaches and GMs, one has to pick their spots to go against the league office, and the “load management works” is not a good argument to make in front of their fans and paying customers. Also, don’t expect teams to go away from it because of what the league says during television contract negotiations.