NBA’s Load Management Rules Limit Stars’ Road Rest: Data Viz
In 2012, the San Antonio Spurs were fined $250,000 by then-NBA commissioner David Stern for resting four key players in a Thursday night TNT game against the Miami Heat. Nonetheless, Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich developed something of a habit during the mid-2010s of giving stars a night off during nationally televised games.
A few years later, the term “load management” became widely used to describe the Toronto Raptors’ strategy of resting Kawhi Leonard for back-to-back games in 2018-19. Leonard, who missed most of the previous season due to right quad rehab, played only 60 of 82 games for Toronto despite never sustaining a serious injury. When Leonard rested, he was often listed as having minor injuries such as a “sore knee,” a strategy that many other teams now use when sitting players.
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From 2017-18 to 2022-23, the number of times a star player played one game of a back-to-back but not the other (excluding multi-game injuries and Game 82) nearly doubled (+87%). So in September, the NBA’s Board of Governors approved a Player Participation Policy (PPP) to “promote player participation in the NBA’s full 82-game regular season.”
Teams must comply with the following rules regarding star players (defined as having made an All-Star or All-NBA team in any of the three prior seasons, or the current season):
No more than one star player can be unavailable for the same game.
Star players must be available for national TV games and In-Season Tournament games.
Teams must maintain a balance between the number of absences for a star player in road games and home games, with a preference for home games.
Teams must refrain from a long-term shutdown of a star player.
Healthy players who are resting must be at the game and visible to fans.
There are exceptions for players missing consecutive games due to a longer-term injury, players with a unique injury history, veterans who have logged more than a certain number of career minutes (including Kevin Durant and LeBron James), players missing games for personal reasons and teams that have clinched their playoff position.
Teams may be subject to a $100,000 fine for the first violation, a $250,000 fine for the second violation, and $1 million more than the previous penalty for each subsequent violation.
Most of these rules are not new ideas. The league implemented a player-rest policy in 2017 that included similar concepts. That set of guidelines, though, didn’t deter franchises from sitting stars.
The Brooklyn Nets sat eight players, including Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, for a Dec. 10 back-to-back contest at the Indiana Pacers last year, a move that yielded a meager $25,000 fine. Later in the season, the Golden State Warriors rested Stephen Curry, Draymond Green, Klay Thompson and Andrew Wiggins for a game in Cleveland without penalty.
The league office is expected to be more stringent in enforcement this time around. Automatic NBA investigations will be triggered in specific cases, and the league will have the right to use an independent medical review to determine a player’s status if necessary.
The first two rules of the PPP have garnered the most attention—an entire starting lineup missing in action at once or a superstar absent from a national TV game both significantly degrade the fan experience. Actual situations when those rules come into play may be infrequent, however. Sportico found just five games last season in which teams were definitively non-compliant, along with a handful of other cases in which teams likely would have been fined at the league’s discretion.
The bigger adjustment for franchises will be the required home/road balance. Of the 88 instances last season in which a star player played one game of a back-to-back but not the other, 77% of the skipped games occurred in away arenas. The previous season was less lopsided, but still had 66% of such occurrences on the road.
Across 2021-22 and 2022-23, the Warriors most regularly rested multiple stars simultaneously. They sat a star on one end of a back-to-back but not the other end 16 times, but never once at the Chase Center in San Francisco.
From a league-wide perspective, the NBA’s demand for teams to prioritize resting stars at their home arenas is understandable. Fans have 41 chances to see their hometown star players throughout the season and only one chance to see many of the other teams.
It is also, in a sense, a small revenue-sharing maneuver. It will force superior teams with stars to take the hit of potentially decreased demand in a home game, while teams without stars still get to enjoy the increased interest of those same superstars visiting their home arena.
In terms of raw numbers of games played by stars, the rule regarding end-of-season shutdowns may have the biggest impact. Damian Lillard and Bradley Beal each missed the final 10 games of last season for the Portland Trail Blazers and Washington Wizards, respectively, which were both out of playoff contention.
In addition to the PPP, awards criteria in the league’s new collective bargaining agreement will help the cause. To be eligible for MVP, All-NBA teams, Defensive Player of the Year or All-Defensive teams, players must now play 65 regular-season games (or 62 if they suffered a season-ending injury).
Last season's Defensive Player of the Year Jaren Jackson Jr. didn’t meet the new requirement. Additionally, an all-time record five of the 15 players selected to 2023 All-NBA teams—Giannis Antetokounmpo, LeBron James, Stephen Curry, Jimmy Butler and Damian Lillard—would not have been eligible for the honor under the current rules. In each full-length season since 2017-18, at least three selected players played fewer than 65 games, which only happened once in the previous 50 years.
These awards have an enormous influence on earnings. The percentage of the salary cap that teams are allowed to offer players in contract extensions changes dramatically based on whether they were All-NBA the previous year. For instance, Ja Morant missed out on $39 million over the next five seasons by not making the cut last year.
By introducing the new PPP and providing strong incentives to play at least 65 games, the NBA is pushing teams and players to curb load management. “There’s an acknowledgment across the league that we need to return to that principle that this is an 82-game league,” commissioner Adam Silver said at a press conference in September. “If you’re a healthy player in this league, the expectation is that you are going to play.”
It’s a 180-degree turn from Silver’s stance when asked about the issue at the 2023 All-Star Weekend. “I hesitate to weigh in on an issue as to whether players are playing enough because there is real medical data and scientific data about what’s appropriate,” Silver said in February. “These are human beings who… play through all kinds of aches and pains on a regular basis, and the suggestion that these men… should just be out there more, I don’t buy into.”
The NBA reduced the frequency of back-to-back games by more than a third from 2014-15 to 2019-20, but can no longer decrease that total without altering the length of the season. The Play-In Tournament and the In-Season Tournament have only made the schedule more crowded. The average number of back-to-backs per team in 2023-24 is 14, up from pre-COVID and even a slight increase from last season’s 13.3.
Unless the NBA lengthens the span of its regular season or reduces the number of games, there will be plenty of back-to-backs. As long as there are back-to-backs, teams will continue to prioritize players’ health and longevity by resting them.
While not eliminating player rest, the league’s new load management policy will force teams to make different calculations and difficult decisions about when, and where, that rest takes place.
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