Dumars goes distance for all-in message
It was difficult to determine whether Joe Dumars was speaking as head of basketball operations for the NBA or the former All-Star and NBA champion who played in perhaps the most physical, grueling, and glorified era in league history.
Dumars made it clear this past week the NBA wants to revert to that past, when players — even the great Michael Jordan — played in every game as a matter of pride, fan entertainment, and team enhancement.
With Dumars’s strong voice, the NBA made it clear there are three points of emphasis for this season and beyond: 1. The days of load management are over; 2. The All-Star Game must improve and be more competitive; and 3. The in-season tournament ain’t going anywhere so embrace it.
For the past few years, the NBA has danced around the topic of load management as all 30 teams have taken advantage of the league’s gullibility and rested healthy players, even for significant and/or nationally televised games. The product has suffered.
After watching players such as Kawhi Leonard, Paul George, Anthony Davis, Bradley Beal, and Damian Lillard
sit out games (in many cases as a team decision), the NBA implemented a player participation policy that mandates that teams cannot rest multiple healthy stars in the same game.
Teams must also ensure star players are available for nationally televised games and players don’t shut down for prolonged stretches when their team is no longer competing for a playoff spot.
Dumars and colleague Evan Wasch,
the NBA’s executive vice president of basketball strategy and analytics, are in the midst of visiting all 30 teams during training camp to emphasize these new rules. Dumars, the former general manager of the Pistons and part of one of the most talented backcourts in league history with Isiah Thomas, said the league means business.
“We are really emphasizing that this is an 82-game season,” he said. “It’s an 82-game league. It’s not a 50-game league or 60-game league or anything like that. What that means this is not a gun to anyone’s head that you’ve got to go out and play 82 games and drag yourself out there. What it does mean is that it’s hard for us as a league office.
It’s hard for fans, media, and everybody when you hear a guy’s been scheduled to rest three months from now. I mean what are we doing?”
There has been a shift in thought with many players who want to avoid career-threatening injuries and preserve energy for the postseason, so the regular season has suffered. Privately, many players observed the fate of former Celtic Isaiah Thomas, who played for two months with a torn hip labrum in 2017 as Boston reached the Eastern Conference finals.
The Celtics traded Thomas a few months later and he was never a fulltime player again after suffering extensive damage to his hip. It has become a cautionary story about choosing health over team. But the league believes many players have resorted to missing games simply because they seek rest.
“If a guy is hurt, if a guy is injured, if a guy is beat up and battered, and he needs a day off, he’s going to take a day off and he deserves a day off,” Dumars said. “This is not ‘You got to play no matter what’ but a healthy guy that’s in this league that’s not injured, we expect that guy to play. That’s not asking anyone to do anything that’s incredible.
“We schedule 82 games. We are just reemphasizing to guys, ‘Guys, you do realize this is an 82-game league, and if you’re healthy and you can do it, everyone expects you to play.’
“What we’re really talking about is the culture of this league and the culture of this league is that every player should want to play 82 games. That’s the culture we’re trying to reestablish right now.”
Commissioner Adam Silver said in the past that medical data proved resting was impactful for player preservation. But what the league has observed over the past several years is that increased rest has not prevented injuries. Players are hurt at the same rate.
“The data has continued to evolve over time to where we are now,” Dumars said. “Where we are now with this, we don’t have the data to support [that rest reduces injuries] fully right now. We may have thought we did. Therefore you see some of these new rules instituted into the league right now is really based off the data.
“If the data said anything different than what we’re doing right, we wouldn’t be doing it right now. The data doesn’t substantiate what we previously thought.”
Dumars said the league has had conversations with all parties involved: front office executives, coaches, owners, and the players association. It was collectively agreed that load management would be greatly reduced.
“We’ve talked to everyone about this,” Dumars said. “We’re an 82-game league. We need people to embrace that. Let’s play. We’re talking about a healthy guy, that’s a healthy scratch with no injury documentation with nothing. Those are the things we look at now. That’s the phone calls that will come from us investigating.”
As for the All-Star Game, Dumars said last February’s game in Salt Lake was the final straw. Team Giannis beat Team LeBron, 184-175, in a game that was never competitive. In one stretch, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, playing on opposite teams, went one-on-one for several possessions while the other eight players watched.
The NBA has changed the format considerably over the past several years to draw interest; implementing the Elam ending, the player draft, and resetting the score after every quarter.
The changes have failed at making the game more competitive.
“The All-Star Weekend has turned into this incredible weekend, and it is,” Dumars said. “But at the end of the AllStar Weekend, the game can’t be an afterthought, where guys don’t play. We’ve talked to players about putting on a great show the last night, actually getting out there and competing.”
All-Star Weekend has turned into a marketing and branding showcase for players, who don’t want to risk injury during the game. The NBA would prefer players use the first half for showboating and then become more focused on victory.
“You see all the slippage in missing of games during the regular season, the All-Star Game devolving into what it did this past year and none of that happened after one year,” Dumars said. “At some point, you have to stop the slide. You have to address it. I agree that it’s not an easy proposition, but I can tell you for sure that you’re never going to have any impact on it if you don’t address it.
“This is something that’s been happening time and time again. Nobody is saying the All-Star Game has got to look like a playoff game, but there’s somewhere between what we saw this year and a playoff game that’s a happy medium for all of us.”
Dumars acknowledged low ratings and lack of interest from fans, sponsors, and other stakeholders encouraged the league to address the players.
“Yeah that’s a part of it. All of this,” Dumars said. “It’s never really one thing with this type of stuff. All of this matters. The reaction of the fans, players, your broadcast partners, absolutely that’s a part of it. To pretend that it isn’t would just be dishonest.”
Said Wasch: “Just visually, the ‘23 All-Star Game was clearly far below the standards even for recent All-Star Games. There was a lot of negativity around what was seen. This one was pretty unique.”
As for the in-season tourney, Wasch has been fielding questions about the format, in which every team will play round-robin rounds in groups of five. The winners of each group, along with two wild-card teams (determined by record and point differential) will play an eight-team tournament. The semifinals and championship will be Dec. 7 and 9, respectively, in Las Vegas.
The Celtics’ five-team pod includes Toronto, Brooklyn, Orlando, and Chicago. All games against those teams will count for their record to qualify for the quarterfinals.
One of the questions he has been fielding is, “Why are we doing this?”
“At the core we’re trying to create better competition and we think there’s an untapped opportunity to create even better competition within the NBA,” Wasch said. “The notion of a single championship, a single trophy being lifted each season is fairly unique and when we look all around the world, the idea of being able to win multiple things each year is a well-accepted practice and that creates very exciting competition throughout the calendar.
“Instead of just having a slow-build Larry O’Brien [title trophy] in June, we think we can create another peak in the NBA calendar in December, another thing to celebrate, another thing for players, teams, fans to rally around and something that’s going to build legacies, build résumés, and be an exciting property for our fans to look forward to every year. We think it’s going to create higher quality basketball.”
Dumars said the most popular question from the players is pretty simple.
“The question I’ve been getting is, ‘How much is the money, Joe D?’ ” Dumars said. “And ‘Do they tax this Joe D?’ ”
Players on the winning team get $500,000 each, $200,000 for players on the championship loser. Semifinal losers get $100,000 and quarterfinal losers get $50,000.