Mike Greenberg is one of many singing the praises of NBA Commissioner Adam Silver for trying to find a solution to the load management practices that keep some of the league’s biggest stars from playing in regular season games on a national stage. He won’t be part of ESPN’s NBA coverage next season, but says it is important to him as a fan.
“For the last two years, I had the magnificent pleasure and privilege of hosting our coverage of the NBA on ESPN and ABC through the Finals,” he said Thursday on ESPN Radio, “and I am delighted to hand that baton off to Malika Andrews, who is ready to take it and run with it faster than anyone ever has before, but what will not change is that the NBA is in my blood. I love it. I will love it for the rest of my life.”
Among the provisions in the new rule are a limit on how many star players can sit in a single game and a clause that says all players must be available for nationally televised games and any games in the new in-season tournament. The NBA has also made it clear that they would prefer that teams rest their stars for home games, instead of for road contests, which may be the only chance paying fans in that city have to see the visiting teams’ stars play.
Greenberg said there was a time when these rules would not be necessary. It is why he is always quick to defend players of the past in debates about what some of those greats might be if they played now.
“The biggest problem that we have is that there was a mentality amongst players who grew the league that one of the important things, your love of the sport, which I’m not questioning the love that all these players, the current or the previous ones have for the sport,” Greenberg said. “But everyone from Magic Johnson to Larry Bird to Michael Jordan to basically the stars of the eighties and the nineties, I think they felt a real obligation and a priority to leave the league in a better place than they’d found it. That was one of the things that they felt proud of. It was important to them.”
He was quick to point out that those players could never even dream of the popularity that the NBA enjoys now. That popularity is why players in 2023 don’t have to think the way players did thirty or forty years ago.
“It’s not a criticism. It means these guys have grown up in a in a world in which the NBA has been as popular as almost anything could possibly be. They take it for granted because they don’t know any other way, and it never occurs to them that me sitting this game out is going to have any impact on that whatsoever.”
Media consultant John Kosner agrees with Greenberg’s assessment. He thinks the new rule is important for the league as it heads into media rights negotiations. He told Front Office Sports that the league has to be able to deliver the kinds of audience in the regular season that it does in the playoffs in order to add value.
I don’t think it’s just that the NBA players don’t think of the ratings impact. Players love the spotlight and playing on the biggest stages. They’re more likely to want to play during these big nationally televised games. Also, we live in the age of ring culture. We’ve pushed the importance of winning titles to the point where the regular season doesn’t matter as much, guys are just trying to conserve themselves for the playoffs. Plus, Gregg Popovich and the San Antonio Spurs, who are the most respected coach and franchise of this generation, popularized load management.