The NBA's new CBA won't be enough to prevent the problem of resting players

The NBA is approaching a reckoning with the issue of teams resting star players for select regular-season games. While the new collective bargaining agreement reached on Thursday adds a minor fix, rest is quickly on its way to becoming the NBA and the National Basketball Players’ Association’s next major battlefield.

Let’s define the challenge first. Here’s why teams resting players is increasingly becoming problematic.

That’s a fan who spent a decent-sized paycheck intending to watch LeBron James, only for James to not even make the trip to Memphis. The Cavaliers only visit Memphis once a season, and in their game there on Wednesday, they sat out the trio of James, Kyrie Irving, and Kevin Love for the game. Even the box score says it: DNP-REST.

Cleveland’s season doesn’t really start until the playoffs, so keeping their players as rested and healthy as possible is a top prerogative. They’re the reigning champs and they know they’re the best team in the East. While they would love to win the league’s best overall record to guarantee home-court advantage in the Finals, there’s only so much effort the team is willing to exert towards that goal. It’s far more important to ensure that James and the rest of the roster is healthy and energetic in June.

It’s not just the Cavaliers. Teams all around the league have taken to resting certain players, especially older ones, on the second night of back-to-backs. Only one player (James Harden) logged more than 3,000 minutes last season. Ten years ago, that number was 20.

Teams have never been more worried about progressive fatigue and even the mental grind of playing 82 games. “The Cruel, Unrelenting, Back-Breaking, Knee-Busting Anti-Logic of the NBA Schedule,” screams out one ESPN headline from last season, doing an excellent job linking together injuries, fatigue, and the NBA’s absurd travel schedule. Thus, periodic rest is perfectly reasonable given each player is an investment costing millions of dollars — but only at the cost of dragging down the overall quality of play.

The NBA is passing as many temporary fixes as possible.

It was just four years ago that the NBA fined the San Antonio Spurs $250,000 for resting star players without even blaming injuries to cover their absence. The league didn’t do that again, and in the years since, they’ve listened to the teams’ concerns.

The NBA schedule makers have steadily reduced the number of back-to-backs each team plays during a season, and they’ve all but eliminated the dreaded four games in five nights. In three years, four-in-five dropped from 70 to 27 to now just 21 for the 2016-17 season. After teams averaged 17.8 back-to-backs last season, that number has fallen to 16.3.

But that’s still an average of 16 games played for teams with less than 24 hours to recuperate. Many back-to-backs require travel, which means teams sometimes don’t arrive in town until 3 or 4 a.m., barely 12 hours before players are required to report at the arena.

The new CBA will shorten the preseason and start the regular season a week earlier. A mid-October start to the season — with a maximum of six preseason games — will give the NBA more breathing room to fit in 82 games without needing as many back-to-backs.

But unless the league cuts into the offseason and moves up the start of training camps, it will be almost impossible to completely eliminate back-to-backs without more substantial change.

The league could take harder stances with resting players.

The NBA fined the Spurs back in 2012 in large part because they did it for an anticipated national television showdown. A huge percentage of the league’s money comes from the television providers, after all, and star players sitting out of games they invested millions in isn’t good for business.

As teams resting players becomes even more common, the NBA could try to curb the practice. They could limit players sitting out for rest to just one or two, or they could require advanced notice for resting players (which could at least help ticket-buying fans). Of course, it’s hard to stop teams from resting a player and calling it a “sore hamstring,” especially since everyone has a nagging ailment by midseason. But perhaps it’ll make the public relations part of it look better for the NBA.

But even then, that’s only if the NBA could actually institute those rules without drowning in backlash from the teams themselves, who see resting players as a strategic move and don’t want the NBA interfering with how they run basketball operations.

The most drastic option would be to cut down on the 82-game season.

In the NFL, every game is too important to worry about rest, while in baseball it’s understood that 162 games will mean star players leaving the lineup from time to time. The NBA is in a weird place in the middle, where fans are used to superstars playing every game even as teams increasingly disagree.

Reducing the number of back-to-backs helps, but without cutting the total number of games, it’s unlikely the league can ever fully eliminate them. One solution would be a 72-game season, which would allow teams to play everybody twice and in-conference opponents three times (assuming there are 30 teams in the league).

But 10 fewer games means 10 fewer opportunities to sell tickets, merchandise, and concessions, and ultimately will affect the money coming in — even if the rates increase to compensate for the lost games. Reducing the games would be messy, and both sides would be inclined not to compromise on a few issues that would probably be required. There’s currently too many problems to ever expect it to happen.

That means the NBA is stuck with an 82-game season and unclear solutions about how to rest players without creating boring games without the league’s largest stars. And it means fans who spent $800 for tickets, travel, and lodging in Memphis so they could watch LeBron James and Kyrie Irving are stuck seeing the Cavaliers lose with DeAndre Liggins and Kay Felder.