Give it a Rest
Recently, the Cavs played the Clippers. Big game, showed live on ABC. “Watch Chris Paul and the Clippers take on LeBron James and the Cavaliers, this Saturday only on ABC.” Well, Cleveland used this game to rest their 3 best players. This made the league very mad.
You see, the league just recently got a very big pay raise thanks to the new TV deal. So when those high paying TV stations are going to air the games nationally, they expect the big name players to play. The same thing happened with the Warriors vs. Spurs game a week before. Somethings got to give… right?
The players of generations before will come out and say that they never rested. The generations of today will come out and say if they had, would they have played longer?
Would the LA Lakers with Karl Malone have won the title if Malone would have rested in his Jazz days? Would Kobe have had a couple more seasons if he rested in the dark Lakers years of the mid 2000’s? No one can be sure, sometimes injuries just happen. However, I don’t see why people are getting so upset at the players now for trying their best to prolong their career.
Here is an example of the Warriors schedule from this season. It starts with a back-to-back in Philadelphia and Washington D.C. on Monday and Tuesday. Then a Thursday night game in Chicago. Then a Sunday, Monday back-to-back in New York and Atlanta. Now I could stop here and it would be a rough week for a team. However, that part of the schedule was just the warmup.
The Warriors then take the five-hour, 2,500-mile flight from Atlanta back to the Bay Area for a game against the Celtics, then immediately fly back another direction for a nearly four-hour, 2,000-mile flight northeast to Minnesota. Then the next night, after a 1,500-mile flight south, they finish up the gauntlet in San Antonio. Thirteen days, nine flights, eight games, three back-to-backs.
LeBron went to 6 straight NBA Finals. He has played in the playoffs every year since 2006. He has competed in the Summer Olympics. Why wouldn’t the man be allowed to rest? “Well you never saw Michael take games off for rest” . I mean… he did take a slight break in between those 3-peats… but I guess that doesn’t count.
How to fix the rest issue?
For starters, don’t have the nationally televised games be the fourth game in five days. Look into starting the season a little earlier. This season the first game was on October 25. Maybe push it back slightly to October 20th or even October 15th. There is no way you can shorten the number of season games. I REPEAT DO NOT SHORTEN THE NUMBER OF GAMES. Can you imagine last year with the Warriors going 72–0 because they shortened the season? You need 82 games.
Another change the league should look into is East coast/West coast travel time. So far they are doing a pretty good job at sticking the road trips to one side of the country or another. However, you also have to consider that some teams can be in the same conference, but still thousands of miles apart. Like I mentioned earlier with the Warriors, we have to look at miles traveled and time differences when we change the schedule.
I’m aware that this isn’t an easy fix (although it kind of is… leave the schedule as is and let the players rest). This will take some careful planning and a lot of work from NBA executives (the people who aren’t competing and doing the work/travel) to figure out a solution to deliver the best product (actual people playing the highest level of basketball on the planet night in and night out) for the customers (the TV networks/us the fans… we might demand too much out of them too).
