National Basketball Association

There's only one viable solution to the NBA's rest issue

Published Mar. 22, 2017 2:46 p.m. ET

Dieter Kurtenbach

It’s not a new issue, but it has come to a flashpoint.

The NBA feels it has a serious problem with players sitting out games they could play, and commissioner Adam Silver wants to put it to an end.

Earlier this week, Silver sent a memo to teams stating that the resting of healthy players was "an extremely significant issue for our league.” Silver even called on owners and team governors to be part of the decision-making process when it comes to resting players.

The tone of the letter wasn’t conversational — it was a decree, punctuated by Silver’s threat of “significant penalties” if teams resting players don’t follow full protocol.

The NBA has had enough of DNP-Rests.

The league's memo was no doubt sparked by the Warriors and Cavaliers, who in back-to-back weeks opted to not play their three best available players for Saturday prime-time games.

Why were Stephen Curry, LeBron James, Kevin Love, Kyrie Irving, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green resting? The answer was simple — their teams were playing back-to-back games.

The NBA is missing the point by decrying playoff teams resting star players for effectively meaningless regular-season games. They’re trying to cure the symptoms without first diagnosing the disease.

There’s only one way for the league to stop its star players from resting during the regular season — the NBA has to build more rest into teams' schedules.

Now the NBA isn’t going to shorten its season — it’s too large an undertaking to cut, say, 20 games off the schedule, both politically and possibly financially — but they can lengthen it.

If you’re a team that’s expecting to play deep into the playoffs, that means you’re looking down the pipe at 100-plus games. That’s a long haul, particularly for superstar players — the bedrock of franchises and the league. For instance, over the last six seasons (not including this campaign) in Miami and Cleveland, LeBron has played 94.5 games per year at 38 minutes per game, and those numbers would be greater if not for systematic rest.

This season, the average NBA team will play 16 back-to-backs. The Cavs and Warriors both had 17 back-to-backs on their schedules. That’s 34 games — nay, opportunities — for teams to avoid what they have come to believe as unnecessary wear-and-tear on their best players.

And do you think James (or Curry, or Spurs star Kawhi Leonard) cares about ruining an NBA Saturday PrimeTime in March? That game, at its best, will pull 15 percent of an NBA Finals game’s rating, and it’s the latter contest that James is thinking about when he rests. [And the notion that any superstar player shouldn’t rest for specifically nationally televised games (as implied by the league in sending the memo) is overly burdensome — how often are the Warriors and Cavs on national television?)

The league can’t ban teams resting players, either — instead of DNP-Rest, Gregg Popovich would cite one of the handful of ailments and knocks every player picks up over the course of the year as the reason for the benching.

No, if the NBA wants to curtail healthy players from sitting out games, they have to get rid of back-to-backs.

The NBA already knows the most direct solution to their problem — they’ve worked hard to eliminate stretches of four games in five nights and they’re reportedly planning on starting the 2017-18 regular season as many as 10 days earlier than this campaign. But a week-and-a-half isn’t even close to enough time.

The most effective way eliminate back-to-backs — and in turn, the rest epidemic — is to add a month (or more) to the NBA regular season.

Start the campaign at the beginning of October. What’s the harm? The league is already going up against the baseball playoffs and the NFL, and the preseason doesn’t need to be more than two games.

And if the NBA doesn’t want to claim the entire month of October, why not augment the mid-month start by extending the regular season to the end of April? Who cares if the NBA Finals ends on June 15 or July 1? If the NBA is feeling particularly saucy, they can even space it out so that an NBA Finals Game 7 would always fall on Independence Day — think of the ratings for that game!

If the NBA really believes that DNP-rests are an "extremely significant issue,” then it’ll have to take “extremely significant” actions to work with the Players' Association to fix it.

The league now has the blueprint.