IT'S JAN. 20, and the Golden State Warriors are making their only visit of the season to Cleveland to face the suddenly formidable Cavaliers. But their biggest stars are all on the bench, sidelined in no small part because of what transpired the night before.

Less than 24 hours prior in Boston, the Warriors fell in a thrilling overtime loss against the Celtics, a rematch of the 2022 Finals. Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson all logged heavy minutes -- Thompson with 36, Green 37, Curry 43. After the game, the Warriors flew to Cleveland -- landing after 2 a.m. and hitting the pillows around 3 a.m. -- to close out a back-to-back set and the last of a five-game road trip.

In an effort to save the Warriors' dynamic but aging trio, Golden State coach Steve Kerr decides to give his future Hall of Famers a night off. It's not an easy decision, and, before facing the Cavaliers, Kerr laments the circumstances.

"I feel terrible for fans who buy tickets expecting to see someone play and they don't get to see that person play," Kerr tells reporters before the game.

"It's a brutal part of the business."

The short-handed Warriors eke out a win against the Cavaliers, but the team's absences steal the headlines, elevating the league's "load management" debate once again.

"We have so much more data," Kerr said before the game, "so much more awareness of players' vulnerability. It's proven that if guys are banged up, back-to-backs, players are much more likely to get injured and miss more games. So that's why you're seeing it leaguewide. Everybody is being cautious when a guy is banged up. You're just playing the long game."

New Orleans Pelicans guard CJ McCollum, president of the National Basketball Players Association, said he's sensitive to the league's concerns about the impact of load management, which league sources said became a "major point" of emphasis during collective bargaining agreement talks between the NBA and the NBPA last month.

"You understand the effects that this is having on our business," McCollum told ESPN. "Obviously, we're looking forward to figuring out ways to continue to keep our players healthy and safe. But we do know that this is an issue. We're not blind to that. It's something that is affecting our game and having a negative impact on our game."

Said Joe Dumars, the NBA's executive vice president and head of basketball operations: "It's a very important issue to the NBA, a very important issue. We understand that fans and media and people want to see the best players in the world play. And so it's an issue that's got everybody's hands on deck to try to figure this out."

How exactly, though, remains to be seen, said Dr. John DiFiori, the NBA's director of sports medicine.

"There's been a lot of things -- hundreds and hundreds of papers published in the last five years -- but it's very difficult to try to distill that down into a model that can be implemented within a team that will actually be successful," DiFiori told ESPN. "It's not for lack of trying."

Many team officials still advocate for a reduction in the NBA's 82-game regular-season schedule, but they also acknowledge the likely drop in revenue for all 30 teams makes doing so a nonstarter.

"I'll never say never," NBA commissioner Adam Silver said during the recent All-Star Weekend about reducing the schedule.

But in interviews with top league officials, GMs and front-office executives, agents, team medical officials and other medical personnel who work with teams and players, none could provide a viable resolution to the NBA's ongoing load-management issue. And many point to a range of factors -- issues that, they said, make the problem unfixable.

The question is why.

LOAD MANAGEMENT, OF course, is not a new concept. The NBA fined the San Antonio Spurs $250,000 in 2012 for sending four starters home before a nationally televised game against the Miami Heat. Then, in 2017, the league implemented rules to curb such efforts, which gave Silver the ability to fine teams for sitting healthy players in instances that include nationally televised games. Since then, the league has regularly enforced those rules.

In April 2021, the Spurs were fined $25,000 for resting three players in a road game in Phoenix. In that same month, the Toronto Raptors were fined $25,000 for resting two players in a home game against Orlando. In December of this season, the Nets were fined $25,000 for resting eight players on the second of a back-to-back against the Indiana Pacers. Also in December, the NBA fined the Heat $25,000 for "violating league injury reporting rules," and the Heat responded by listing every player on the injury report for their next game.

Over the past decade, the NBA has made significant adjustments to the schedule in an effort both to address player health and safety concerns and DNP-rests.

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In 2012-13, for instance, the average team played 19.1 back-to-backs. That figure has fallen to 13.3 in 2022-23. Stretches of four games in five nights have been eliminated from the schedule, whereas teams played an average of 2.5 of those stretches in 2012-13.

Stretches with five games in seven nights have been reduced from 4.2 per team in 2012-13 to 1 per team this season. The average team, over the course of the 174-day season, will travel 41,300 miles, an all-time low and down from 44,900 in 2012-13. The NBA has also worked to minimize travel on back-to-backs; now, the number of back-to-backs involving travel has been reduced from 18.4 per team in 2012-13 to 9.6 per team this season, a 48% reduction.

And as part of the CBA negotiations, which sources said were aimed at creating incentives for stars to play in more games, the NBA and NBPA agreed to tie eligibility for postseason awards -- such as NBA MVP, Defensive Player of the Year, Most Improved Player and the All-NBA and All-Defensive teams -- to a mandatory 65 games played, league sources said. (For context, entering Tuesday, two of the three leading MVP candidates have yet to hit the 65-game mark -- Milwaukee's Giannis Antetokounmpo has played 62 games, Philadelphia's Joel Embiid has played 64, and Denver's Nikola Jokic has played 67. Each of their respective teams have four games remaining.) Players must play 20 minutes per game for it to count as a game -- except in two of the 65 games, a player can play between 15 and 20 minutes and it will still count, sources said.

Ultimately, several team medical officials said, the goal is to find a sweet spot -- allowing a player to play a maximum number of games and minutes while minimizing injury risk and preserving health. Efforts toward that end have led more teams to practice less and hold fewer shootarounds. In fact, LA Clippers coach Ty Lue recently addressed a question about Curry's strong play at age 35 for the Warriors.

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"Thirty-five years old, playing at a high level that he's playing at -- a lot of guys are doing that nowadays," Lue told reporters on March 15. "Back when I played, that wasn't the case. So I guess, putting the work in, taking care of your body, I think the medical side and with the science and everything, just making sure you're doing it right by the players and everything you're doing for their body to try to preserve those guys has been great. You see guys are playing at a higher level at an older age."

Why is that? Lue was asked.

"There are two words that I don't want to hear," he responded. "But it's better."

Lue was, of course, referencing "load management," and many around the league cite Clippers star Kawhi Leonard, 31, as the poster child of the movement. (Since suffering a quadriceps injury with the Spurs in 2017, Leonard hasn't played more than 60 games in a season, often sitting out games in back-to-back sets. Despite his on-again, off-again availability, Leonard led the Toronto Raptors to the 2019 NBA championship.)

"I will say," McCollum said, "having watched the Clippers the other night, Kawhi looks really good."

"The way [load management] is discussed, it's that the players don't want to play," McCollum added. "What needs to be more emphasized is the fact that players do want to play."

Still, even with the scheduling tweaks and untold millions of dollars invested on medical and scientific advancements, so many still don't -- or can't.

LEAGUE AND TEAM medical officials, along with several team executives and agents, continue to point to the impact of youth sports specialization, a modern trend in which kids play the same sport year-round as early as 7 years old. The physical toll, they say, from playing hundreds or perhaps even thousands of games -- pounding the same muscles and tendons and joints over and over again -- with little to no recovery time has led to many entering the NBA with a range of health issues, often serious.

"It's very rare to have a kid come to the [NBA] combine with a pristine health history and nothing in his background," one veteran Eastern Conference team health official said.

Dumars, an All-Star shooting guard with the Detroit Pistons in the 1980s and 1990s, has noticed it as well.

"My generation, I played basketball, football and baseball. I played all sports. I wasn't on the basketball court 365 days a year," he said. "And so even when I was president of the Pistons, I was seeing guys eight, nine years ago, 10 years ago coming in, and their bodies, you could tell there was mileage on their bodies already at 20, 21."

Said DiFiori, "We're concerned about it for sure."

ESPN reported on this growing crisis in youth basketball in a two-part series published in 2019. Since then, several team medical officials and others say the issue remains -- with some claiming it's only getting worse.

"These contracts are so enormous, so these players are putting everything they can into being the best," said one veteran health official who works with several teams. "A lot of it is just not good for them. There's only so much tread on the tire."

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What can't be disputed is that All-Stars are missing as many games as ever.

Entering Tuesday, this year's 27 NBA All-Stars -- using all All-Star selections plus the injury replacements -- have combined to miss 413 games, the second-highest combined total for an NBA season, according to Elias Sports Bureau. (The most came in 2021-22, when All-Stars missed 434 combined games.) Previously, 2016-2017 marked the first and only season in NBA history that not a single All-Star played every game, per ESPN Stats & Information, but that has now happened both this season and last.

And All-Stars tend to miss more games as the season progresses. From 2013-14 to 2022-23 (and excluding the pandemic-impacted 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons), All-Stars played in 82.5% of games in October, but that number would drop to 74.7% by January, then 62.9% by February, then 57.3% by March, then 54.1% by April.]

"There's nothing particularly happening this season that we haven't seen happening over the last several seasons," Silver said in Salt Lake City in February. "I understand it from a fan standpoint that if you are particularly buying tickets to a particular game and that player isn't playing. I don't have a good answer for that other than this is a deep league with incredible competition."

Even before the coronavirus pandemic, the total number of missed games due to illness and injury was trending upward -- and that trend has continued. That figure hit 5,000 in the 2013-14 campaign, the first time it reached that mark since the league stopped using the injured reserve list prior to the 2005-06 season, per certified athletic trainer Jeff Stotts. Stotts has cataloged the careers of more than 1,100 players since that point and is considered the most authoritative public resource for tracking injuries in the NBA.

It would again surpass the 5,000 threshold in 2017-18 (5,560) and again in 2018-19 (5,236). This season, entering Tuesday, it's projected to again pass that mark, with 5,527, which, outside of the stretch impacted most by the pandemic from 2019 to 2022, would be the second-highest such figure that Stotts has recorded.

THE MODERNIZATION OF the game has unlocked unprecedented offensive play, a far more appealing product than the prodding, paint-driven games of the 1990s. But also far more physically taxing.

In the 1990s, it wasn't uncommon for a team to pass the ball to their center in the low post, then largely watch a one-on-one matchup unfold at the basket. But the pace of the game has skyrocketed.

"You have to acknowledge that there's more pace in the game today than before. The floor is more spread, probably a lot more cutting. All of those things are factual," Dumars said. "I don't think there's any argument to that. What it does to the body, I presume, it probably stresses the body as much as anything. ... I don't see how someone could argue against that."

The NBA pace of play, or how many possessions a team uses per 48 minutes, has steadily increased during the play-by-play era (since 1996-97) with an average over 101 at the turn of the 2020s. For comparison, the average pace of play was 91.4 from 1996 to 1999, according to NBA Advanced Stats.

Pace has risen compared to even a decade ago. This season, 13 teams have a pace of 100 or higher. Ten seasons ago, not a single team had a pace of 100, per NBA Advanced Stats. The Cavaliers are last in pace this season at 96.1; in 2013-14, that would have ranked in the top 10.

Percent of games in which All-Stars played*

Month of the season
October	82.5
January	74.7
February	62.9
March	57.3
April	54.1
*From 2012-13 to 2022-23, excluding pandemic-impacted 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons

"The style of the game, the pace, change of direction is much different now than it was," another veteran Western Conference athletic training official said. "We know from measuring load -- through tracking, GPS and camera systems -- that deceleration and change of direction are extremely taxing on the body, and we know there are more possessions, a higher rate of speed, more change of directions today."

Said another Western Conference athletic training official of today's game: "Each possession, you have a higher rate of exposure."

OTHERS ACROSS THE league put it more bluntly.

"Some people are trying to win a championship," McCollum said. "Some people are in a rebuilding phase."

In other words, some teams rest players for a postseason run; others do so on a player-by-player basis as a matter of routine (see: Leonard, Kawhi); and others, still, sit players, sometimes for large stretches, to tank for better positioning in the draft.

And all of these scenarios dramatically shift during the season. Yet one factor that all teams face -- and that stakeholders around the league reference time and again with respect to load management -- is the NBA's 82-game regular-season schedule.

It is, to many, the culprit -- and the obvious solution.

"In the NBA, the problem is the load on players with 82 games plus playoffs is very close to what these players can manage if their mechanics and their body is in the right place," said Dr. Marcus Elliott, founder of the California-based P3 Applied Sports Science, a training center that specializes in advanced athlete assessment.

Both rarely are.

And after three seasons of pandemic stops and starts and schedule and calendar shifts, multiple team executives pointed to the relentless schedule as compounding the already grueling grind.

The league stopped play in March 2020, with 22 teams resuming play in the enclosed Orlando, Florida, "bubble" that summer through Oct. 11, 2022; then the 2020-21 season began 72 days later -- as opposed to the usual 100-plus-day gap -- on Dec. 22, 2021; then the 2021-22 season was shortened to 72 games, but it was plagued with stoppages due to COVID-19 spread.

"We crammed three seasons into roughly a year and a half," one NBA GM said.

The summer of 2022 was the first "normal" offseason for teams in three years.

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There have long been calls from medical officials outside the league to reduce the schedule -- in some cases, significantly -- to provide players more in-season rest.

And among some NBA front-office executives, including GMs and some team medical officials, there persists an unproven theory: that fewer games could mean players are more rested, and thus the quality of the games could potentially be higher. And with fewer games, scarcity would increase, meaning teams (and the league) could demand more for advertising, marketing and sponsorship rates, as well as ticket prices. In all, such an approach could mean more, not less, revenue.

"It's why I'm going to continue to advocate for 72-game seasons," Kerr told reporters back in Cleveland. "Let's be really smart. Let's take care of these guys and play fewer games and the overall quality of the game will be better, and if that's the case revenue is going to go up anyway."

But for the many who continue to say such a reduction is the solution to the NBA's load-management problem, there are just as many who say it isn't -- or won't be. That the 82-game schedule is here to stay, and with it, ongoing load management.

"The schedule is a billion times better than it was when I came into the league," one NBA GM said. "The NBA has done a way better job with it. But we're stuck with it."

"It's incredibly complicated," said NBA agent Mark Bartelstein, the CEO of Priority Sports and Entertainment. " At the end of the day, players are assets of the teams, and they want to properly manage those assets. And from the players' perspective, this is their business. No one is soft. This is simply trying to make good decisions because players are independent contractors who are trying to have as long and successful careers as they can."

In the "brutal business" that Kerr referenced, some fans travel great distances to see star players who don't play while teams wrestle with protecting those players for the postseason. It's an issue that DiFiori calls "a high priority for the league," and McCollum is of the same mind.

"We want to be able to provide entertainment for our fans," McColllum said. "But we also don't want to jeopardize the health of our players. So figuring out that balance, what that looks like, is important for us, and I don't think there's one answer. But I think having discussions and actively trying to drive change in our game to make it better is a sign that we're heading in the right direction."

-- Matt Williams, Jason Joseph and Michael Proia of ESPN Stats & Information contributed to this story.

Why nba load management problem unfixable

2023-09-20 21:30:47