Quote:
Originally Posted by Cobra Mgr
This is a network problem. Not an NBA problem. Since professional sports began, fans were at risk of their favorite players not being available the day they bought tickets. No one gave a flying fig. Now that players dont care if it is a national broadcast or not, the networks want to make roster decisions. Tough. If they were smart, they would just make flex schedules like they do with Sunday night football to minimize the risk.
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Agree with the flex schedules idea. However, I'm guessing that many of those "load management" decisions are made too late for the networks with respect to where & when to send their broadcast team and their equipment...
Disagree that it's just a network problem and not an NBA problem. When it begins to affect the NBA's bottom line, that's when it becomes their problem. In addition, if it contributes to fans' perception that players are lazy and overpaid, and that then starts to affect the bottom line (and/or start to affect the fragile egos of certain players), then it becomes an NBA problem.
Part of the solution, I'd think, would be to schedule marquee matchups to where neither team is on the first or second of a back-to-back, thus significantly reducing the chances of a star player taking a night off due to "load management." (The NBA is already trending towards fewer b2b's and fewer 4-games-in-5 nights, so this suggests that the NBA already sees LM as a problem.)
Hopefully, the long-term answer will be that this is just a temporary wave in the mindset of players, although I doubt that. That said, there has pretty much always been "load management." It's just in how it's been implemented... I recall that both the Lakers and Celtics in the 80's would leave stars at home and/or barely play them in road games at the end of the season. Of course they got fined for it, too. Then Popovich took it to a new level. And Kawai to yet another level.