Is it Time to Confront the Load Management Issue?

In His Recent GOVERNORS address, NBA COMMISSIONER Adam SiLver QUOTED load Management and Stars taking too many Nights Off. 

For the past four or five years the NBA has been faced with the same issue every postseason and offseason, what can we do to stop the biggest stars from taking nationally televised games off. The term load management was coined around 2019 when Kawhi, playing for the Raptors had taken an excessive amount of time off, especially in nationally televised outings for “injury management.” Since then (around 2020) the league has cracked down on practices like this, prohibiting players from taking nights off for reasons such as injury/load management when their game is on national television. But, the league still has a problem on their hands. The most recent example came at the end of this year, what was shaping up to be an incredible playoff race in the Eastern Conference turned into a tank fest with teams trying to lose and sit out their best players to avoid a first-round matchup with the Brooklyn Nets. Everyone is patiently waiting for the NBA to try and stop teams from resting their key players, because let’s be honest, no one wants to get tickets to an NBA game just for the starting 5 to look like this.

“I’m not standing here saying I have a great solution,” Silver said. “Part of the issue is injuries. One of the things we have focused on at the league office and we’re spending—we had begun to spend a lot of time on pre-pandemic—are there things we can do in terms of sharing information, resources around the league to improve best practices, rehabilitation?

Quote via: https://www.hotnewhiphop.com/adam-silver-expresses-concern-over-excessive-load-management-news.150377.html

This quote from Silver, while yes gives us very little to work worth, also shows the toughness of the situation. There is no truly easy way to go about confronting this problem, shortening the season is something that is frequently mentioned, but that wouldn’t stop players from sitting out, it would just mean that there would be less games and owners would make less money. While it sucks for both fans and executives alike to not be able to see your favorite players night in and night out or for full seasons, looking at you Ben Simmons, that might just be the way the future of the league goes. There truly might not be a solution for it, we might just have to trust that players are sitting out for their personal health and not to attempt to lose games, because that is when the NBA that we love so much begins to die.