The NBA Struck Gold
The NBA has a rest problem.
For Saturday night’s ABC primetime matchup between the Golden State Warriors and San Antonio Spurs – the top two teams in the West separated by 1½ games – Warriors coach Steve Kerr rested Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green and Andre Iguodala.
The league’s TV partners are paying the NBA $2.6 billion per season to televise NBA games, and Disney can’t be thrilled about Saturday’s development. Same can be said for fans who invested in tickets for this matchup.
“I’m sympathetic to fans who turn out — whether they buy tickets to games or watching games on television and don’t see their favorite player on the floor,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver has said previously.
—USA Today
Mar. 12, 2017— I will not forget the look of disappointment on the face of a little San Antonio boy in the stands, realizing that his favorite players were sitting out an all-important game that would have determined the one-seed in the Western Conference for the time being. He was supposed to watch Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Kevin Durant, and Draymond Green operate the greatest half-court offense in NBA history against a lethal trio of Kawhi Leonard, LaMarcus Aldridge, and Tony Parker. Instead, he and the rest of the disappointed audience saw a starting lineup of Shaun Livingston, Patrick McCaw, Matt Barnes, Keon Looney, and Zaza Pachulia combine for 31 points and lose by 22 to Patty Mills, David Lee, and Davis Bertans.
Games like this one contributed to the NBA’s 6% decrease in viewership from 2017 to 2018, and the issue still exists in 2023. Fans pay hundreds of dollars to see the best players in the world play, not for a 30% chance of them being rested. Kawhi Leonard and Paul George have been the best examples of this over the years. Steve Ballmer—the owner of the Clippers—implemented a heavily analytic-based approach in 2019 when Los Angeles acquired the two California-born superstars. Part of the strategy was that Leonard and George would be rested throughout the season in order to save more energy for the playoffs.
Amazingly, this season is the first in which the Clippers have Leonard playing back-to-backs.
In seasons where Leonard had no significant injuries, he has played in just 68.2% of the team’s games. All in all, he has played only 170 of 327 games since joining the Clippers. George has played 198. Though they get the blunt of the criticism, LA’s duo aren’t the only players who miss too many games. Over half of the 2022-2023 All-NBA players missed over 15 games last season.
This picture does not even include the players that were essentially disqualified from All-NBA honors for missing too many games.
Kyrie Irving (60 games), Ja Morant (57 games), Anthony Davis (56 games), Paul George (56 games), Devin Booker (53 games), Kawhi Leonard (52 games), Bradley Beal (50 games), Kevin Durant (47 games), LaMelo Ball (36 games), Zion Williamson (29 games).
The season prior, it was the same deal.
Bottom line: the NBA has a rest problem. Star players are missing too many games.
The NBA has tried to cope with this issue for years. At the peak of Kyrie Irving’s streak of frequent disappearances during his time in Brooklyn, well-known analysts including Stephen A. Smith of ESPN advocated for the NBA to hand out game checks to punish players like Irving for skipping games. In his first three seasons with the Nets, Irving missed 62, 28, and 53 games with personal issues being the reason for many of them. But game checks would be unfair to players who were legitimately injured, so the league steered away from them.
The league has also explored suspending players and coaches for resting, and this year, they implemented a new system restricting games that star players can miss, saying that if they miss a certain number of games, they are ineligible for end of season awards. They exact details are below.
The policy will take effect at the start of the 2023-24 season.
The league defined a star as someone who has made an All-Star or All-NBA team in the past three seasons.
The new policy states that teams must ensure star players are available for national television and In-Season Tournament games. They must also maintain a balance between the number of one-game absences for a star player in road and home games, with a preference for such absences to occur at home.
At a news conference following the board of governors meeting, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said this new player resting policy is “reinforcing that we’re an 82-game league.”
—The Athletic
Despite the league’s efforts, there was still not much cooperation from owners, coaches, and players. In the 76ers home opener, Joel Embiid was listed as questionable for rest up until the tip when it was decided that he should play. There must have been some solution for the NBA to increase player buy-in, and now, in the 2023-2024 season, a solution has finally materialized.
The In-Season Tournament was not a spontaneous creation by the league office—it’s been brewing for over 15 years in attempt to help fix the issues I’ve discussed and generate a higher annual revenue. This season, they’ve decided to unveil it, and it’s been an immediate success.
Immediately, the league tried to psych up fans about the tournament, making sure their audience knew exactly when the In-Season Tournament games would occur, and what they meant in the grand scheme in the season. They also made sure to have the biggest names at the forefront of the operation, bringing in Steve Kerr, Victor Wembanyama, Anthony Edwards, Trae Young, Paolo Banchero, and Cade Cunningham to announce the groups.
Later in the year, prior to the start of the season, videos of about 20 players including Wembanyama, Edwards, Nikola Jokic, Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, and many other household names predicting the results of the tournament surfaced, and were spread religiously across social media.
Along with the extra publicity, the NBA added some extra spice to the tournament games by unveiling custom courts with color schemes that had never been seen before.
At the end of the day, though, it’s all about the quality of the play. Let’s face it. Last year’s NBA playoffs were not the most exciting. All three game 7’s resulted in 20-point blowouts. The milquetoast Finals matchup between the Nuggets and the 8-seed Heat was one of the least watched Finals of the century. Ratings still haven’t reached the level they were at before the bubble, so the NBA needed their new tournament to produce a noticeably higher quality of basketball. And it has.
On the first night of the tournament, five of the seven games were decided by five points of less, and the average margin of victory was just 4.8 points. There were 24 players in action who were an All-Star in at least one of the last three seasons (the league’s definition of a star). Of those 24, only Shai Gilgeous-Alexander didn’t play.
Donovan Mitchell scored 38 points, but came up short to Indiana, who sealed the deal by a score of 121-116 due to Tyrese Haliburton’s 13 assists, and clutch plays from Haliburton and Myles Turner in the final seconds.
Down by one with less than two minutes to play, Damian Lillard hit his two most clutch three-pointers as a Buck to take down the Knicks 110-105, overcoming Jalen Brunson’s 45-point masterpiece.
Stephen Curry dueled against rookie phenom Chet Holmgren in the game of the night. Curry, who had a 30-point game of his own, got the last laugh, hitting the biggest shot of the season with 0.2 seconds left to lift the Warriors over the Thunder 141-139.
In Chicago, The Bulls vs Nets duel came down to the final seconds, when Zach Lavine’s game-winning shot hit the back of the iron to give Brooklyn a narrow 109-107 victory.
Shaedon Sharpe hit two game-tying free throws with 8.3 left in regulation, sent the game to overtime with a buzzer-beating block, and ultimately helped the Blazers outclass the Grizzlies 115-113 in OT.
Nikola Jokic’s 33-14-9 stat line trumped Luka Doncic’s 34-10-8 show in the Nuggets’ 11-point win that featured the best star matchup of the night.
The following week, in the second night of In-Season Tournament Action, players did not disappoint. LeBron James and Kevin Durant had an all-time showdown ending in a tight Lakers victory, Victor Wembanyama had the second-best game of his career against Rudy Gobert, the Rockets edged the Pelicans in a three-point win, and Doncic scored 44 points in 32 minutes against the new look Clippers.
Overall, through two nights of In-Season Tournament play, the stars have shined brighter than usual. On average, the 44 stars that have played in the tournament have scored 1.61 more points than their yearly average and 27 of the 44 stars scored more points than their average.
I showed you the numerous games missed by stars in the last two years. By this time last season, Jokic, Antetokounmpo, Embiid, Doncic, Tatum, Curry, James, Davis, Leonard, and Gilgeous-Alexander (arguably the ten best players in the world) had missed a combined 17 games, and Doncic, Tatum, and Jokic were the only players to played every game. This year, partially due to the In-Season Tournament, those ten players have only missed three games combined.
As a result of the excitement around the league’s newest implementations and stars’ elevated play, the NBA’s ratings were up over 100% in the first week of the tournament, and up 50% in the second week. The single-elimination playoff style in Las Vegas will surely generate a boatload of viewership given basketball fans’ adoration for March Madness.
When the Play-In tournament started between the Trail Blazers and Grizzlies in the NBA Bubble and expanded to eight teams in the following year, there was immediate skepticism. To this day, fans still complain about 9th and 10th seeds being given a chance in the playoffs. The In-Season Tournament feels like a promising rookie—like C.J. Stroud, really. There is hardly any criticism at the moment despite it just starting last week. There is loads of excitement surrounding the tournament and most importantly, there is backing from the stars of the league, who, not so long ago, might have been itching to sit out games in the middle of November. Now, it’s all about who can get their hands on the NBA Cup.