https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/35691143/silver-buy-load-management-being-nba-problem
Consiider the following headline on ESPN.com
Silver doesn’t ‘buy into’ load management being an NBA problem
This is the first paragraph of the story:
“SALT LAKE CITY — NBA commissioner Adam Silver pushed back on the notion that load management is a problem in today’s NBA, saying “I don’t buy into” the idea that players should simply just be playing more.”
Now, the headline and the first paragraph are not easy to decode. Sports journalists tend to fall back on jargon a lot. They live in the world of sports, and they often begin to write like the people they cover talk. People in the world of sports talk in cliches and jargon.
The problem that this writer is attempting to write about is the tendency of teams to not play their best players a lot during the regular season. That is because for a lot of the best teams, the regular season isn’t significant. They will win enough games to get into the playoffs. That is the season that counts. If you can rest your best players, they will have more gas in the tank for the playoffs.
The obvious problem is that NBA teams charge a lot of money to go see regular season games, and so if a family buys tickets for a game, that can cost hundreds of dollars. So they show up with the kids, and the stars aren’t playing. Or they my be playing. It is kind of a crap shoot. In other sports, you can pretty much be certain that the star quarterback will be playing. Or the star outfielder. In the NBA, this has come to be known as “load management,” as opposed to “fraud,” which is the common term for selling a product or service that turns out to be not what was advertised. Or “bait and switch.”
This is a sensitive topic, because sometimes players are held out for “injuries” as opposed to ‘taking the night off,” but no one is really sure whether it is really an injury or not.