Quote:
Originally Posted by rudel.dietrich
82 is too many, but I just don’t see how the toothpaste will ever be put back in the tube in regards to lowering the number of games.
Even with say a 70 game season. That is 360 games missed of revenue.
Back to backs should be eliminated completely. But unless someone on either side is willing to give up money, we will not see a shortened season.
And I have come full circle on the issue. I used to not have an issue with player rest. But as more and more studies show it does not help, and it has become so prevalent I see it as an issue.
Perhaps the league's #1 issue.
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Meh. If it really and truly doesn't have an effect, it'll go away in time. What I see more than anything else is that the guys who are kind of famous for being load managed are guys for whom it 100% would have an effect on - Kawhi Leonard with his long injury history, (current) Lebron James (which needs to be noted because even 5 years ago Lebron played every game)... the Bulls load-managed Zach Lavine pretty heavily in the beginning of the season (much to his personal chagrin, I should add - he IIRC said that if it was up to him he'd play every day) because he was coming off of surgery. Oh yeah, Joel Embiid is still basically a ticking time bomb in terms of his health; I can definitely understand load-managing him in particular.
To me I think the bigger issue, more than guys playing 65 games a year instead of 82 (which, meh either way), is guys playing 28-30 minutes a night when they could play 36-40. That may well be a case where players are just plain not as effective when playing that many minutes night in, night out, and it wasn't an issue in the past because stars were still so much better than rotational players that even at 80% they were better. I do kind of miss there being guys who were like "rotations? What rotations?", although even at that my sense of those guys is built on watching the game in the 90s and 2000s (OK FINE also the 80s) when those guys played 40 minutes a night, not in the 60s and 70s when those guys played all 48, so even there I have to admit that the usage that feels "right" to me probably feels right mostly because it's what I grew up with.