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| Obligatory Warriors freak-out gif |
THE GAME on Saturday night in San Antonio was absolute farce. The Spurs’ 107:85 win over Golden State featured seven of the teams’ 10 starters sitting out, some with legit injuries – Durant, Leonard, and let’s hope Aldredge comes back healthy soon – and the others on account of needing rest – most notably on the part of Golden State, who held out Curry, Thompson, Green, and Iguodala, all of whom were listed in the box score as “DNP-REST.”
This action by the Warriors was met with the usual scorn and outrage from the NBA sock puppets over at ESPN/ABC, who questioned Golden State coach Steve Kerr’s integrity for daring to scratch the entire collection of his healthiest – and also his best – players from what was a nationally televised game. Not only did I approve of this decision on the part of Steve Kerr, but I also appreciated the showing of the middle finger by the Warriors towards the NBA. All involved insist that wasn’t the intention, but given the circumstances, it very clearly seemed that way to me.
The most annoying responses come, of course, from ex-players. There aren’t a pettier, more jealous collection of former athletes than there are in the NBA. The reason for the jealousy is obvious, of course: money. So much money. Mediocre bench players are signing contracts now worth values far greater than what many of the élite talents made in their day. It’s jealousy, that’s all it is, and this is why all of them should shut up about the state of the modern game. But there you had Jalen Rose on Saturday night, whom I generally like, talking during halftime about how the players being held out for Golden State needed to show some pride, as if somehow the decision were up to them. Guess what? It wasn’t up to them. No professional athlete ever wants to ever come out of any game ever. (Was that enough evers in one sentence?) These are the most competitive people on earth. They want to play all the games, and play all the minutes of all the games.
“Back in our day, we played all the games … Michael Jordan always played all the games …”
Aah, yes, the old ‘Michael Jordan did it’ example. That’s right, the greatest player in the history of the game did it, and managed to be great. Never mind the fact that part of what made him great was having the ability to get through the sorts of difficult situations that others couldn’t, like having to play four games in five days in five different cities. Just because “back in your day,” you played all of the games, it doesn’t mean that you actually played very well. In fact, you probably didn’t play very well at all. And how do I know that, besides having sat through quite a few games over the years in Seattle where teams were dead tired on the second night of back-to-backs? Research.
Consider the predictor put forth in this article by the sleep researchers at UCSF, in which they went through and marked games on the NBA schedule in 2015-2016 where certain teams were likely to lose because of insufficient rest, and 78% of the time, those teams did just that. You can play all the games that you like, but if you’re almost 80% to lose in a given situation, you’re clearly not doing it well, at that point.
Quite honestly, I’m surprised it’s that low of a rate, but I suspect the reason it was that low was that a good number of those 22% of wins came from the Warriors, who logged 53,000 miles last season on the road, more than any other team, but were good enough to overcome it much of the time. The Warriors are logging even more miles this season – 54,000 all told – and some of that cannot be avoided because of geography, of course (to no surprise, Portland is second on that list), but some of it also has to do with flying for one-offs in order to accommodate the demands of national TV schedules. This ridiculous game on Saturday night was the Warriors’ fifth in seven days, and was the sixth in nine days for the Spurs. This game never should have been taking place, and neither team cared about anything other than keeping more guys from getting injured.
Not only was it the fifth in seven days for the Warriors, but it was the eighth in 13 days during a ridiculous escapade which saw them start out with a back-to-back in Philadelphia and Washington, a game in Chicago, a back-to-back in New York and Atlanta, a cross-country flight to play a single game against Boston, then a back-to-back in Minnesota and San Antonio. That’s five time zone changes and 11,000 miles, during which time the team had held one practice. That’s nuts. And lest you think I’m just grumpy that they’re losing lately, their schedule in January – in which they played nine of 10 games at home with the only road game being a bus ride to Sacramento – was also nuts. This 8-in-13 stretch was the worst bit of scheduling I’ve ever seen in the modern NBA – which is saying something for a league where the schedule is terrible for everyone. The flip side for the Warriors basically tanking against the Spurs last weekend is the fact that, on countless occasions this season, Golden State opponents have done the exact same thing to them – figuring they aren’t likely to win anyway, so why put players at risk? – and the games are boring. The games are basically over after a quarter and a half. It’s nice the Warriors win without breaking a sweat, but it’s not good basketball, and yet you can understand why teams are doing it. Given those circumstances, where you’re not likely to win anyway given the lack of rest and recovery time, why not just punt the game away?
Greg Popovich certainly isn’t opposed to that. The Spurs famously got fined $250,000 by
What’s farcical about it, of course, is that professional sports leagues continually, consistently go about using scheduling which all but guarantees subpar performance. The Thursday night games in the NFL are just atrocious from a quality standpoint, and you can understand why – the players involved simply haven’t recovered from the Sunday beforehand. In the NBA and the NHL, there are too many games in too few days, and the quality of play suffers, the risk of injury rises, and when there are injuries, the quality of play suffers even more. This is obvious. It’s a no-brainer. People complain about the fact that fans pay for tickets, in part, because they want to see the biggest stars in action, and so going to see a game and coming to discover that Steph or LeBron isn’t playing is a rip-off. I definitely understand that argument, particularly when it comes to cross-conference match-ups. Games are often dynamically and premium priced based upon match-ups by the clubs themselves (to say nothing of values on secondary ticket markets), and LeBron and the Cavs coming to town are naturally a bigger draw than some random mediocre team like the Denver Nuggets. (Folks in Memphis, in particular, were annoyed that LeBron sat out, since it was Cleveland’s only visit of the season.) But guess what? I don’t want to see bad basketball, either. That cheapens the product just as much as superstars being no-shows.
This is a problem in all sports, both here and also abroad. Seriously, watch any coverage of a non-major tennis tournament, and you’ll see guys and gals tanking all over the place. And why wouldn’t you? If you’re not on your game, and you’re a bit injured, and you’re playing in some irrelevant, secondary or tertiary tournament, what the hell is the benefit of trying to play through it? There’s a reason why domestic cup competitions in Europe have basically become a joke ever since the advent of the Champions and Europa Leagues. There are too many games on the schedule now and something’s got to give. Top clubs in Europe are sometimes playing upwards of 60 games in a season now, which is just preposterous, and one of the reasons why the quality of play in competitions like the World Cup, the Euros and last summer’s Copa América Centenario suffered somewhat is that guys are exhausted! Guys like Ronaldo and Messi want to play every minute of every game. You practically have to lock them in a closet to keep them out of the lineup. Well, gosh, that domestic cup match against some third division team seems like the right time to rest everyone, now doesn’t it?
Players need to fight for this stuff. They’ve done so in baseball, where the union has been adamant about making sure that mandatory days off for the players are built into the schedule. For example, you cannot make up a rainout on a date that causes the players to have to play more than 20 days in a row. The superstar players who call the shots in the players union in the NBA seemed to have been far more concerned about figuring out how to get themselves paid more than they were about the fact that the schedule is appalling in the most recent contract negotiations. Even so, word is the league is looking to lengthen the season 7-10 days, as it would lessen the fixture congestion and cut down on the dreaded back-to-back games, the success rate during which is greatly minimized. I mean, hell, I want as few of those as possible if I’m an owner, since those games tend heavily to result in loses, and I hate losing under any circumstance. I would rather you just get rid of the NBA, NHL, and NFL preseasons entirely, since the players don’t want to be there, the fans don’t want to be there, and no one wants to be there. (I do understand it’s somewhat different in baseball, where the unique motions and mechanics of the game do require a certain amount of pre-season preparation for a long regular season.) Doing so would be a money loser for the owners, of course, as would shortening the seasons, since both of those mean losses in gate receipts, but it’s always seemed to me that better quality of play = higher demand for your product, which means you can actually charge more for it. Having spent all of $9 to go to an NBA game in January 2016 in New Orleans, I can tell you that the demand for the product isn’t anywhere near as great as the league owners would like to think.
The Warriors were fed up on Saturday. They’d hollered in the ear of Adam Silver about this 8-in-13 stretch the moment they saw the schedule this past summer. Word was that they were thinking about sitting everyone of use for the Spurs game even before Kevin Durant got hurt and Steph Curry forgot how to shoot. They were pissed off about the schedule, and deliberately tanking a showcase game might actually get someone’s attention in the league office about going back and reëvaluating the scheduling procedures. Good on them for doing it.
The Warriors clinched a playoff spot with 25 games to go and don’t really care about playoff seeding. Quite honestly, neither do the Spurs or the Cavs, which is why I suspect you’ll see even more DNP-RESTs popping up in their box scores between now and Apr. 15 and I have no problem with that, as all of those teams are playing the long game here. So much depends, come playoff time, on the health of your players. We’ve been shortchanged the past two seasons in the Golden State-Cleveland match-ups by the fact that one team has so clearly been so much healthier than the other. I want to see good basketball. No, I want to see great basketball. Given the costs involved – the money at stake, the costs to the consumers – having a great product doesn’t seem like that much to ask.
