The rise of the NBA’s international popularity in the last 25 years has been vast and colossal. But as the league and the game of basketball have grown into a worldwide giant, controversy has stretched its skin near to the point of internal turmoil.
Over the past year, the infamous decline in NBA ratings has been attributed to several factors. People are watching and attending the highest level of professional basketball in the world, significantly less than they were at the start of the decade. In perfect correlation timewise, no factor is more prevalent in the league’s popularity decline than the increasing total game absences of the league’s brightest stars.
At the turn of the century, when the NBA was caught between Michael Jordan’s Last Dance and the building of LeBron James’s kingdom, unheralded stars had their first chance to make a worldwide name for themselves as the face of the league. While Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal, and the Los Angeles Lakers filled that void, iron men such as Allan Houston attempted to build themselves the only way they knew how: leaving it all on the floor every night.
Houston, who played 12 years in the association as a multi-time all-star with the New York Knicks, had no room in his dictionary for “load management” in his playing days. Then again, pretty much nobody did.
“It was a standard that was set,” Houston said recently. “If Patrick Ewing’s practicing an hour and a half, with his eyes and his knees up, and he’s not taking days off, I’m damn sure not gonna take days off, right?”
Since the days of ice bags taped over knees, technological advancements have been applied to maintaining an athlete’s body for peak performance. Injuries are part of the game, but they have now been found to be a crescendo of damage rather than one lousy step more often than not. Thus, organizations have caught on to this fact and found a solution that may benefit them but alienate their fans.
A practice first introduced sparingly by Gregg Popovich’s Spurs in the early 2010s, load management has gradually become an all-encompassing epidemic, casting shadows over the recent careers of stars such as Kawhi Leonard and Joel Embiid. The disregard for fans pining to see their favorite players in action turned enough people away that the NBA, in an attempt to win them back, established new player participation rules last year that set a benchmark amount of games for players to play in should they avoid confirmed injuries.
As relentless as players like Houston were back then, they have even realized the growing awareness of needing a night off, citing the game’s changed nature that takes more out of one by the game.
“I don’t like to compare eras, but I will say that there’s more data and there’s more information,” Houston said. “They run a lot more. The pace is faster. So if you notice how, from a physical standpoint, they’re taking off and landing, then there’s a lot more pace and space in the game.”
The playing style in the league from Houston’s heyday to the pace and space game we see today is night and day. And despite the former era presumably being more taxing on a player’s body, more stars today are playing fewer games. In 2003, Houston’s final 82-game season, the average all-star played 79 games per season. In 2023, the mean number of games played amount for all-stars is down to 64.
Rather than citing player participation rules as a fix, Houston offers a different approach to combat load management for today’s stars. Having played 82 games four times during his seven-year peak, Houston implores today’s youngsters not to save their bullets but to prepare themselves properly, using all their new information, to shoot more of them.
“The process of building up capacity is what I attribute it to. The bottom line is you have to get in really, really, really good shape and build your body up.”
Allan Houston: Press Conference Recap
The rise of the NBA’s international popularity in the last 25 years has been vast and colossal. But as the league and the game of basketball have grown into a worldwide giant, controversy has stretched its skin near to the point of internal turmoil.
Over the past year, the infamous decline in NBA ratings has been attributed to several factors. People are watching and attending the highest level of professional basketball in the world, significantly less than they were at the start of the decade. In perfect correlation timewise, no factor is more prevalent in the league’s popularity decline than the increasing total game absences of the league’s brightest stars.
At the turn of the century, when the NBA was caught between Michael Jordan’s Last Dance and the building of LeBron James’s kingdom, unheralded stars had their first chance to make a worldwide name for themselves as the face of the league. While Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal, and the Los Angeles Lakers filled that void, iron men such as Allan Houston attempted to build themselves the only way they knew how: leaving it all on the floor every night.
Houston, who played 12 years in the association as a multi-time all-star with the New York Knicks, had no room in his dictionary for “load management” in his playing days. Then again, pretty much nobody did.
“It was a standard that was set,” Houston said recently. “If Patrick Ewing’s practicing an hour and a half, with his eyes and his knees up, and he’s not taking days off, I’m damn sure not gonna take days off, right?”
Since the days of ice bags taped over knees, technological advancements have been applied to maintaining an athlete’s body for peak performance. Injuries are part of the game, but they have now been found to be a crescendo of damage rather than one lousy step more often than not. Thus, organizations have caught on to this fact and found a solution that may benefit them but alienate their fans.
A practice first introduced sparingly by Gregg Popovich’s Spurs in the early 2010s, load management has gradually become an all-encompassing epidemic, casting shadows over the recent careers of stars such as Kawhi Leonard and Joel Embiid. The disregard for fans pining to see their favorite players in action turned enough people away that the NBA, in an attempt to win them back, established new player participation rules last year that set a benchmark amount of games for players to play in should they avoid confirmed injuries.
As relentless as players like Houston were back then, they have even realized the growing awareness of needing a night off, citing the game’s changed nature that takes more out of one by the game.
“I don’t like to compare eras, but I will say that there’s more data and there’s more information,” Houston said. “They run a lot more. The pace is faster. So if you notice how, from a physical standpoint, they’re taking off and landing, then there’s a lot more pace and space in the game.”
The playing style in the league from Houston’s heyday to the pace and space game we see today is night and day. And despite the former era presumably being more taxing on a player’s body, more stars today are playing fewer games. In 2003, Houston’s final 82-game season, the average all-star played 79 games per season. In 2023, the mean number of games played amount for all-stars is down to 64.
Rather than citing player participation rules as a fix, Houston offers a different approach to combat load management for today’s stars. Having played 82 games four times during his seven-year peak, Houston implores today’s youngsters not to save their bullets but to prepare themselves properly, using all their new information, to shoot more of them.
“The process of building up capacity is what I attribute it to. The bottom line is you have to get in really, really, really good shape and build your body up.”
Scott Sandulli