In 2008 the NBA Champion Celtics defended the Boston Garden 13 out of 14 times, and were a paltry 3-9 on the road. That season, the Home Team won 74% of all NBA playoff games. In 2014, the San Antonio Spurs, after falling late at Home in Game 2 of the Finals, eviscerated the Miami Heat by 20 points apiece in Games 3 and 4 before taking the series in 5. That season, the Home Team won just 57% of playoff games. Whether or not you believe those numbers are statistically meaningful or completely random, I’m here to tell you that in both cases I saw the immediate correction the next season.
In 2009, a few months after Home Court Advantage seemed paramount to postseason success, the NBA finished one Orlando Magic victory shy of having its first ever season with four 60+ win teams. In 2015, on the heels of a 4-1 defeat to a team Chris Bosh described as the best team he had ever seen, LeBron most certainly recognized three facts:
1. Tim Duncan, at age 37, led his team in playoff minutes. He was second to only LeBron in Win Shares for the 2014 playoffs.
2. Duncan hadn’t played more than 35 minutes a game since the 2004 season when he was 27 years old, a full three seasons before Duncan famously told LeBron that the NBA would “be your league someday.” A decade later, it was still partly The Big Fundamental’s league. Meanwhile, best friend Dwyane Wade was breaking down right in front of LeBron’s eyes.
3. Home court advantage didn’t mean squat during that postseason run. So, in 2015, on the heels of a beatdown at the hands of a 37 year old center with only one working heel, LeBron James surprised everyone by taking two weeks off to chill in Miami in the middle of December. No matter the Cavs were mired in a malaise and Bill Simmons was “I’m not saying/I’m just saying” aloud if SuperStar LeBron was a thing of the past. [pause for dramatic effect] It worked out. Rest, that is, worked.
The NBA’s rest issue is fundamentally about competing incentives. Mike and Mike appropriately simplified the problem as such: there’s the business of winning championship, and the business of the business. Being a star-driven league lusting over global expansion, the NBA has some defining traits that primes it for this rest controversy. Let’s consider the Big 3 professional sporting leagues in America: MLB, NBA, and NFL.
Major League Baseball plays 162 games and the median ticket price is $32. Rest is fundamentally built into Pitcher and Catcher rotations and fans have no quarrel with this besides the occasional purist bragging on behalf of some long-dead hurler. The last pitcher to start both games of a double-header was Wilbur Wood in 1973. He was a knuckleballer. For the star sluggers, cumulative (not per game) statistics are a huge incentive to get as many at-bats as possible, and outside of those hoping to catch a Barry Bonds at-bat in 2004, few baseball fans are paying to see a particular player in the visiting dugout. The NFL is at the other end of the spectrum. Median ticket prices were $86 last season. Star players would rarely sit out a game due to injury concerns from fatigue until a playoff bye is clinched, and then, they’d be almost guaranteed to sit once that incentive has been locked in. But the value of each game is so high that there are very few competing incentives that could convince a coach to sit a difference-making player. In fact, NFL players are known for playing through injuries.
The NBA is in a strange place. If we dig into all the competing incentives around the decision to rest or not rest a star player in a regular season game, it becomes clear that what some teams are increasingly doing is rational, and becoming more incentivized. In fact, after exploring all the facets of this issue, I hope Adam Silver sent a second, private letter, thanking the Cavs for being as liberal with LeBron’s minutes as they have and actually asking them to tone it down a bit, you know, for the long term health of the league, which, since 2002, has been inextricably tied to LeBron James.
The incentives directing a decision NOT to rest:
1. Playoff Seeding (Team)
2. Rotations/Rhythm (Coach/Team)
3. Popularity (Player)
4. Respect (Player)
5. Accumulated Stats / Streaks (Player)
6. MVP Consideration (Player)
7. $ from Ticket Sales (Mostly Owners)
8. Fans Don’t Feel Disrespected (The Commissioner/The Collective Owners)
I’m going to cap myself to one fact or tidbit about each of these to show how the total calculus is trending in a direction that’s going to require a fix beyond shaming, leaked plea letters, and six-figure fines.
Playoff seeding: This chart shows that until last season, home court advantage was evaporating in the playoffs.
Rotations/Rhythm: it’s hard to say how much of an incentive this is. Coach Lue mentioned it the other day, that he just wanted his team healthy so he could work on normal, playoff rotations. It’s hard to imagine this trumps some of the other incentives.
Popularity: Is LeBron going to become less popular in LA because he sat out a game against the Clippers? Not at all. His popularity had nothing to do with LA Clippers games before now.
Respect: This is the area that most pundits are trying to leverage, using shame and hyperbolic hot takes to shame players and coaches into not using DNP’s on otherwise healthy players. Someday someone will use these DNPs against LeBron in an argument comparing him unfavorably to Michael Jordan. Will it bother LeBron? Actually, it might. Is it fair? Not completely. Jordan did bring it every night in a way anathema to “Chill mode”, but he also took two years off from basketball and started his NBA career three years older than LeBron.
Accumulated Stats: This is sort of a hard to lock down. If LeBron plays less games overall, he’s going to accumulate less stats, and have a lesser chance of catching Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for the all-time NBA scoring record. But, less games overall doesn’t mean less games per season. LeBron’s not going to play into his 60s by only suiting up a couple times a season, but he probably doesn’t maximize total games by playing 82 a season as long as he can. LeBron has said he prefers less games to less minutes per game, so that’s probably going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Streaks: The only streaks that end when a player gets a DNP is the active games played in a row streak, currently held by Tristan Thompson. It’s a powerful incentive for him, as he’s been battling tendinitis but still played in that Clipper catastrophe. The Cavs are actually planning to rest him by starting him and taking him out early, to keep the streak alive.
MVP Consideration: It’s hard to know how badly LeBron wants another MVP trophy. Clearly, it’s orders of magnitude less important to him than a Finals MVP trophy, but it might be the strongest incentive for him to not miss too many games as a healthy scratch.
Erza Shaw | AFP
Ticket Sales: Dan Gilbert paid $40 million dollars so that the Cavs, should they face Dwight Howard, could defend him without double teaming. He spent…(alright, you know the speech.) CavsDan didn’t buy the Cavs as an investment. He bought them because he’s competitive as hell and wanted to own a sports franchise since he was a teenager. He could care less about what the Cavs decision to rest LeBron means for ticket sales now or the perceived downstream affects it might have on the future of the league.
Fan Outrage: No one wants angry fans, and I’m sure LeBron and Dan Gilbert, both proud fathers, can sympathize with the Dad that shelled out a couple hundred bones to sit courtside to watch the brightest NBA stars yuck it up on the bench all game. Lots of NBA people care about this, in the same way they care about reducing fossil fuel emissions. Sounds great as long as it doesn’t affect your bottom line too much. Doc Rivers can virtue signal all he wants, if Chris Paul isn’t 100% his team has a 0% chance of winning one game against the Warriors or Spurs. For the Cavs and other legitimate Championship contenders, the Larry O’Brien trophy is the bottom line, not TV ratings or courtside-fan-in-other-city’s happiness. You know what sucks more than shelling out a couple hundred bones to watch an opposing player in March? Shelling out a couple thousand to watch your team lose a game in June.
So the question is, do these incentives outweigh:
1. Avoiding Fatigue Injuries
2. Ensuring Fresh Playoff Legs
3. Extending Careers
It depends on the situation, but for teams with very little anxiety over their final playoff seeding, the decision to periodically rest stars to avoid injures and/or improve playoff freshness is very rational. In the case of the Cavs, Spurs, and Warriors, the three teams raising eyebrows over the last week, history vindicated their decision before they made it. The Winningest Team in NBA history believes it was defeated because it spent too much energy trying to set the regular season wins record. The most successful franchise in the post-Jordan era won titles seven years apart with the same core players by meticulously managing their minutes and extending the career of their franchise anchor. And for the Champs? Our Cavs? Let’s see, they didn’t need home court to sweep the 60-win Hawks nor to become the first team in NBA history to overcome a 3-1 deficit, much less a 3-1 deficit with two of the next three games on the road against a team that hadn’t lost three straight games in three years. They believe they’d have won the title in 2015 if one of Kyrie Irving or Kevin Love had been healthy for the Finals.
For the league, this is going to get worse before it gets better. A couple years back, famous gambler Bob Voulgaris bragged on twitter that he knew more than NBA coaches and could prove that intentionally fouling bad free throw shooters was an irrational decision. Long before Kevin Pelton looked into the actual data (Voulgaris just modeled situations using expected value, instead of, you know, actually looking at what happened) proving it made a ton of sense, I already realized Voulgaris was wrong. Why? Because if someone has to be wrong between Gregg Popovich and Bob Voulgaris, it’s not going to be Gregg Popovich. That goes for the benefits of “DNP-Old”, reduced minutes per game, and trading regular season wins for fresh playoff legs. Everyone (including Adam Silver) is parroting this idea that health analytics point intransigently towards more rest being a good thing. I’m not going to waste Pelton’s time asking him to look it up. Popovich aint wrong, and anyway, there’s too much recent history on the minds of these teams. Remember, recency bias cost Dan Gilbert 40 million dollars in 2010; if Adam Silver wants to drop a million dollar fine on him for resting LeBron next week against the Spurs on National TV, at least it will be a million dollars for 48 minutes, and not 58 seconds of Andrew Bogut.
If the NBA wants to eliminate DNP-Old, or DNP-(fiction) without getting draconian, they can do two things. First, they can remove every “schedule loss” that teams face due to tough travel, four games in five nights, back to backs, etc. They will do this to some extent, but if they want the problem to go away it needs to be the maximum extent possible while keeping an 82 game season. A more fundamental change, and one that would immediately alter the incentive calculus, is to give the top 2 teams in each conference a first round playoff bye. Suddenly, Kevin Love’s arm stays in its socket, Kyrie Irving and Iman Shumpert get a week off to heal, and LeBron is guaranteed his rest. That is an immense incentive worth fighting for and it addresses one of the biggest disincentives to trying to win as many regular season games as possible – fresh playoff legs. In fact, you could argue that every seed becomes more valuable in this system if the ultimate goal is to go as far as one can in the playoffs.
This is probably a pill too hard to swallow for the NBA. Playoff games are all nationally televised and the best teams get the best ratings. For the owners, more playoff games = more revenue. So, does this make any sense? Not really. Why trade playoff games for regular season games? In my opinion, the larger problem is that the regular season is so inferior to the playoffs. How many times have you watched an NFL game in November and heard the announcers say “this game has a playoff intensity to it” when referring to the effort level and quality of play (as opposed to say a rowdy crowd)? Or a baseball game? You will hear this an uncomfortable number of times if you follow the NBA closely. Meaning, it’s worth pointing out every time both teams are playing with a sense of urgency, because it’s not the norm. Playoff basketball is a completely different level of play. It’s like the last half of the 4th quarter of a tight game, but, for 48 minutes instead of six.
The NBA has a regular season problem, and forcing teams to play their stars “or else” will only exacerbate the problem, leading to an epidemic of chill mode among the elite teams, mirrored by the #tankstrongs shortly after the trade deadline. As long as the NBA is selling (and the fans are buying) star players and not rivalries, coaches, or ball movement, expect these concerns to grow louder as more and more teams follow suit given the current incentives.
