NBA Commissioner Adam Silver Doesn't 'Have a Good Answer' for Load Management Issues
Imagine you're a Washington Wizards fan who, for one reason or another, can't make it to many live games to support your team in person as often as you'd like.
When you can make it, you're likely to be a little picky, right?
Maybe it's a rivalry that you target, like when the Wizards hosted the hated Cleveland Cavaliers in early February.
And when you arrive, you're met with immediate disappointment because you already knew forward Kyle Kuzma would miss the game with an injury, but now you find out guard Bradley Beal will as well.
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Turns out, he tested his sore foot, and either he or the team decided he was just not ready and needs another day of rest.
You'll find out two days later that not only is Beal ready to return to action, but he also turns in 33 minutes in a 14-point Washington win over the Charlotte Hornets.
That's not going to help you forget the letdown of witnessing both stars absent as your Wizards get smoked in a 23-point loss to the Cavs.
Was Beal really unable to go at all two days prior? Or was it a decision made by he and/or the team in what's dubbed, 'load management'?
In today's NBA teams and players are all about leveraging load management to keep their championship hopes alive even if it means dropping some winnable regular season games.
It's a tricky subject because the health of players has to be a priority, but when a player is able to play and doesn't, fans are the ones left with the disappointment.
"Times have changed," NBA legend Karl Malone said in an interview with NBA.com during the break. "But you would have had to kill me for me not to play. Somebody would have had to hit me in the head to get me to sit out a game."
We don't know that having to hit Beal over the head to get his foot healthy is the right answer, and there's probably a sweet spot between the Malone-era mentality and today's.
Because in recent years we've seen some of the league's marquee players sit out potential future playoff matchup contests in order to rest.
Sometimes without any ailments at all, let alone true physically limiting injuries, in an effort to prevent their opponent from having any direct knowledge of how to play against them at their best.
That strategy doesn't normally get announced until the day of, and the fans who paid inflated prices to witness a top-shelf contest are left with backups.
And the NBA's commissioner doesn't have a clue how to fix the problem.
"I understand it from a fan standpoint that if you are particularly buying tickets to a particular game and that player isn't playing," Adam Silver said during the All-Star break acknowledging the frustration load management can cause in today's game. "I don't have a good answer for that other than this is a deep league with incredible competition."
It takes a lot of basketball talent to play in the NBA, nobody is disputing this fact.
But to say that can or should make up for fans missing out on seeing their favorite players in action when they could be playing but chose - or the team chooses - not to, is far from a fair or respectful answer.
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Some have recommended trimming the amount of regular season games played, which would allow the NBA to eliminate back-to-back games while simultaneously making each contest more important.
But the owners would never agree to such a profit-slashing idea.
Perhaps the answer is expanding the schedule further into the calendar year in order to afford more time between contests.
Although players and staff wouldn't likely appreciate their vacation time cut into without a bigger piece of the pie.
There's no perfect answer, although Silver admittedly has no good ones either.
But the current situation passes the downside of load management down to the fan alone, and that's where things need to be improved upon.
Find David Harrison on Twitter @DHarrison82
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