NEW YORK — Adam Silver, the great enabler of the player empowerment era, couldn’t admit it. He couldn’t bring himself to state the obvious, so we’ll say it for him:
The system is damaged.
Load management or, more broadly, the frequent unavailability of the NBA’s top players, is a real problem. Silver dismissed it last week in the name of biology, claiming players are excused from suiting up consistently because, “there’s real medical data and scientific data about what’s appropriate.”
Silver acknowledged he’s emboldened to endorse the status quo because attendance is up league-wide, not mentioning that deceptive advertising eventually turns off the consumer (just check the tanking TV ratings for the lethargic All-Star Game). But here’s some other data to contemplate:
Fourteen of the NBA’s 15 highest-paid players missed at least 10 games each heading into the All-Star break. None sustained a season-ending injury, but collectively they sat for over a quarter of the season. Put another way: if you pay $500 for a family of four to see a superstar in a superstar-driven league (that would be cheap in New York), there’s a 1 in 4 chance he’s not playing. Similar odds to the ‘play’ something’ option on Netflix.
The player with the most appearances on the top-15 highest-paid list — Russell Westbrook — is easily the worst. And Silver, who gives off a toothless vibe like he’s chewing on rocks, tells us there’s nothing to see here. Never mind that the other major sports leagues don’t share the problem.
At least not to this extent.
“The suggestion that these men, in this case in the NBA, somehow should just be out there more for its own sake, I don’t buy into,” Silver said.
OK, we’ll play along. The players shouldn’t feel obligated to show up for work because there’s too many games. They’re resting for the playoffs months ahead of time, which seems bogus and counterintuitive when most of the teams are fighting for their playoff lives. Surely, the solution is to cut the schedule. Simple. Except that’s never gonna happen. It would decrease revenue. An automatic no-no. Silver is actually trying to add games with a midseason tournament.
When asked about reducing the number of games, the commissioner conveniently found data to declare it ineffective.
“There’s no data right now that suggests,” Silver said, “based on some prior experiments or even as we look at the data over the course of the season and when players get injured, it isn’t — you would think that it would be the case that injuries would increase as the season goes on, and that’s not necessarily it, either. It may be that there’s a fair degree of randomness in terms of when players get injured.”
To recap: the commissioner tells us that science determines an “appropriate” amount of games to preserve health, and then the commissioner tells us that playing fewer games has no effect on health.
Silver made these contradictory statements before one of the more offensive All-Star Games in memory, a contest best described as a layup line. It was appropriate that the star of the weekend was a G Leaguer, and the supporting stars were the TV analysts.
Silver’s actual NBA All-Stars couldn’t be bothered. Why?
“Money talks,” Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said after the game while wearing a fur coat. “The more incentives, I think guys will take it more seriously.”
That’s fine. But then I don’t want to hear the quotes about the love of basketball and the burning desire to be the greatest. It’s also hard to separate this attitude from load management, no matter how many times the topic is thrown in the spin cycle. Is it about staying fresh for the playoffs or more about making it to the next contract?
Are there too many games or are the players being unreasonably selfish? If the answer is none of the above as Silver suggests, there will only be a half-baked solution to a real problem.
