NBA commissioner Adam Silver defends load management
SALT LAKE CITY – NBA commissioner Adam Silver gave his annual All-Star Weekend press conference Saturday, addressing topics related to player load management, the league’s ticket sales and reaching a new collective bargaining agreement this year. Here’s what you need to know:
- Silver said there is “medical data” to support the current practice of load management throughout the league and disagreed with the notion that too many players — especially stars — were sitting out of games without injury.
- He also said the league would set a record for tickets sold and cited improved television ratings as proof that fans were not turned off by players resting.
- Silver said it is the league’s priority to complete a new collective bargaining agreement by the March 30 deadline and said it was his “hope” that a deal was reached by then.
Silver on load management
Of the 24 All-Stars expected to suit up Sunday (we don’t know about Giannis Antetokounmpo’s sprained right wrist yet), only Anthony Edwards (zero), Julius Randle (zero), Domantas Sabonis (two), Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (four), Jayson Tatum (four) had missed fewer than five games this season.
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LeBron James (14), Jaren Jackson Jr. (17), Luka Dončić (10), Antetokounmpo (11), Joel Embiid (12) and Kyrie Irving (14) were some of the habitual missers, to say nothing of Kevin Durant, Zion Williamson and Steph Curry, who are all out for the All-Star Game with injuries and have missed large swaths of the season.
Some of these missed games are indeed due to the care and management of an injury. But the rest, as any NBA fan knows now, is specifically to avoid injury. The catchphrase is “load management,” and it’s happening more frequently — and earlier in the league’s schedule — than ever before.
Silver in the past has acknowledged it’s a problem and has even discussed tying regular-season player awards (such as MVP) to the number of games played. He took a slightly different tone Saturday.
“The suggestion that these men … somehow should just be out there more for (the league’s) own sake, I don’t buy into,” Silver said. “This year we’re going to likely break the all-time record for ticket sales. We’re likely going to have the all-time record for season-ticket renewals. So our fans aren’t necessarily suggesting that they’re that upset with the product that we’re presenting.”
Silver said the league and players’ association were studying lengthening the NBA regular-season calendar to further reduce back-to-back games (which teams often rest top players in one) but resisted reducing the number of regular-season games from 82.
He cited the 2020-21 season, which was 72 games because of the pandemic, as proof that a shorter schedule wouldn’t stop teams from resting players. But he didn’t mention that the 2020-21 campaign followed an NBA Bubble season in which half the teams played in July and August, and the playoffs stretched into October.
For example, there was a January set of games in Cleveland, on a Friday and Saturday night, when the Warriors on Friday kept Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, and Andrew Wiggins out, even though only Wiggins was injured (the Warriors had played the night before). On Saturday, the Bucks kept Antetokounmpo and Khris Middleton out. That’s six All-Stars out of action in one weekend of games in one city.
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Silver said fans and anyone else, like former NBA vets critical of players resting, and media “may need to reset, in a certain way, in terms of expectations” of players being in uniform every night.
“Fans are the ultimate adjudicators and right now they’re telling us they love the NBA,” he said.
Latest from Silver on the CBA
The league and union have on multiple occasions pushed the deadline back for either side to opt out of the current CBA, which still has two years left on it, and both Silver and union executive director Tamika Tremaglio said Saturday it was a main priority to hammer out a new agreement before the next deadline arrives.
“I think for us, our greatest focus is having the greatest competition possible out there,” Silver said. “I think we’ve made great headway over the years as we’ve improved the system to have more competition, as we’re seeing, clearly, from this season.”
“The league’s view is that there are changes that we can make that will make the league even that much more competitive,” he said.
What else Silver said
Silver said the Salt Lake All-Star Game will set records for local economic impact for an All-Star Weekend ($280 million) and for hotel nights (33,000).
He said the last All-Star Game in Salt Lake, in 1993, was his first working for the NBA. He said Michael Jordan was the leading vote-getter that year at about 1 million votes. This year, James led all players with nearly 8 million All-Star votes. There were 20 international players in the league 30 years ago; now there are 120.
Silver added that if regional sports networks carrying NBA games go bankrupt before the season ends, the league has a contingency plan in place to make sure local games are shown in affected markets.
Silver also said there haven’t been any new discussions of league expansion.
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(Photo: Kyle Terada / USA Today)
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