According to Joe Vardon of The Athletic, the NBA has concluded that "load management" being useful for teams to keep their players healthy is not supported by the league's data -- a stunning turn of events given recent rends around the league.
Joe Dumars, executive vice president of the NBA, has said in conjunction with this report that the NBA has "gotten more data, and it just doesn't show that resting, sitting guys out correlates with lack of injuries, or fatigue, or anything like that."
Over the last 10 to 15 years, NBA teams have rested players to make sure they are healthy for the long term. These players are often not actually diagnosed with injury but, rather, take rest days to avoid playing back-to-backs and other consecutive games on the schedule. The league came out with a new policy this offseason to prevent teams from resting all of their players at the same time.
Due to how the NBA schedule is structured, teams often rest their star players on either side of a West or East Coast trip. Usually, it is not announced well ahead of time if a player is resting, however. Sometimes, it is quite obvious if a team has a back-to-back coming up but sometimes it happens out of the blue, which can lead to an unfortunate fan experience of attending a game wherein stars aren't playing that night.
Could new NBA load management data lead to teams resting players less?
Truthfully, it's hard to see all 30 teams change their plans when it comes to "load management". Teams already spend a lot of money on health sciences and are more likely to trust their own data than something held by the league for this season.
Still, it would not be a shock if teams started to follow the league's study in the following years.
For fans who pay a lot of money to see their favorite players play, this could be very good news. The days of shelling out hundreds of dollars to not see NBA stars play could be coming to a close. For the entire NBA fanbase, this would be an extremely welcome sight that would not hurt the players.
