‘Load management’ makes the NBA cringe
On a February road trip last year that straddled the NBA trade deadline, Kawhi Leonard missed a game in Atlanta that was, rare among his absences last season, not technically a load management night.
He had tweaked his knee a little, so was given the night off. A couple of days later, he spoke briefly at a shootaround in Manhattan, and, with the Raptors having just acquired Marc Gasol, the questions and answers were all about that. When the scrum was breaking up, I asked him how his knee was feeling. He looked at me, paused a beat, and walked away to tie his shoes.
Leonard was inscrutable at the best of times, but to ask him about anything health related was to scream into the void. You might as well have asked him for his banking password.
It would seem things have not changed much with his relocation to Los Angeles. On Wednesday morning it was announced that Leonard would be load-managed to the bench for the Clippers’ home game against the Milwaukee Bucks. It’s an ESPN game in the U.S., part of a billion-dollar television contract with the sports behemoth, a potential Finals preview, and it would have pitted the reigning MVP in Giannis Antetokounmpo against the guy who somewhat miraculously shut him down on the way to winning the NBA title and Finals MVP honours. Great matchup!
Or, not. The decision to sit Leonard — while the Clips are still without Paul George — has caused much consternation in NBA circles. No less an authority than Doris Burke, who is not at all a hot-take merchant, was on ESPN (her employer) on Wednesday to decry the volunteer benching. In not so many words, she said it was a load, all right.
“Kawhi not playing, to me, is ridiculous at this point,” she said. “I don’t understand it.”
Burke also called the idea of load management a “long-term problem” for the NBA.
She’s not wrong about that last part. The unpredictable absence of top stars is not great for the ticket-buying public or its commercial-buying advertisers, who happen to be the same groups that ultimately provide the revenue that is poured back into player salaries. It undoubtedly is bad for the NBA’s business to have stars taking rest nights.
But it is also a bell that cannot be un-rung.
The Raptors of last season were not the first team to have a key player like Leonard miss substantial time when he was mostly healthy — the San Antonio Spurs of a few seasons ago often rested their stars in the second half of a back-to-back — but they were the first to do it to such great effect. No one had any idea how healthy Leonard would be after missing almost the entire 2017-18 season with a bum leg, but the Raptors not only kept him from a serious reinjury by aggressively softening his workload, they allowed him to conserve miles so he was able to raise his output in the playoffs.
Some of that was the result of a lucky accident: the team had played well enough in his absence that the Raptors spent much of the final months of the season knowing they were likely to earn the two seed in the East, so when they might have ramped up his usage in a playoff push, they instead just kept sitting him when it seemed prudent.
It was, of course, the precursor to Leonard’s historic playoff performance, which only solidified the fact that he was almost certainly never going to play close to 82 regular-season games again. It’s also true that even with all the rest, Leonard still hurt his leg in the East final against the Bucks, and wasn’t quite the same force from that point on. As much as he is rightly considered one of the very best players in the NBA now on the back of that spectacular run with the Raptors, it’s likely that he’s always playing on a knife’s edge, at risk of an injury setback.
It is a funny thing, the way modern pro sports has evolved. We have leagues where it is widely understood that the entire regular seasons are just a warm up for when it really matters. We have countless pundits and analysts insisting that all that matters to a player’s legacy is rings, baby, rings.
Leonard is just taking that to its logical extreme.
The question isn’t whether he will stop, it’s how many other stars will follow. sstinson@postmedia.com Twitter.com/Scott_Stinson