Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Over the years, you have heard me talk about load management,
and a lot of people give the Spurs credit for
the ones that invented load management based on the fact
that they sent Tim Toni and Mono home on a
commercial flight one year when they were playing in Miami.
What people forget about that infamous night was that it
(00:27):
was the fourth game in five nights.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
It was the.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Seventh game I think of a nine day road trip,
and it was the ninth game on the road in
like ten or eleven games or something like that. It
was a ridiculous schedule that the Spurs were on, and
I think it was a protest from poping the Spurs
to the league enough. I don't care what you find us.
(00:52):
These are world class athletes and we're running them into
the ground now. We used to do this yesteryear in
the eighties, where teams traveled on commercial flights, and that
I can't imagine an NBA team or a professional team
flying commercially these days. It is it is chaos to
have as many people as they need to take with
(01:13):
them on these road trips.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Tried to do with a baby.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Well, it's one thing when you're doing it with a child,
but exactly. I know what you mean, but you have
there's a limited time between gates when you have to
make a connection. And the old rule back in the
day in the NBA was that you could not they
could not fly southwest. Back in the day, that was
(01:37):
taboo because they didn't have first class seats. And the
NBA Players Association agreement was that in less the players
unanimously voted, then you could not fly up on a
plane that didn't have at least twelve first class seats,
and they preferred the ones that had, you know, eighteen
to twenty, so that the coaches would set up there
as well staff and video guys and further down there.
(02:01):
And they didn't take that many assistant coaches back in
the day. Usually it was one or two, maybe three,
and a trainer, your radio guy, and your PR guy
and that was about it. And so now they take
thirty thirty five people on a road trip and to
try to navigate through customs and TSA and baggage checks
(02:22):
and all that kind of stuff. You're getting up at
three o'clock in the morning to catch a five thirty
flight so that you can get to the next city.
And you always had to take the first flight out.
So but we always say, you know, we did a
lot of things differently in the eighties and nineties than
we do now. And look how much longer careers like
Larry Bird and maybe even Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson
(02:44):
could have lasted had they not necessarily load managed. But
they had the conveniences of flying charter and the nutrition,
the things that we know now that we didn't know
back then. So just because we did it in the
old days doesn't mean that it's good. It doesn't necessarily
mean that it's bad either, but it doesn't mean that
it's good. So, and I'm going to preface this segment
(03:06):
by telling you I know nothing about soccer except that
it takes the ninety minutes to play, and they have
something called stoppage time, and nobody knows exactly how much
the stoppage time is except the one ref that's keeping
track of it. And you don't know if you how
many seconds you have to score the game winning goal
in a zero zero or Neil Neil game.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
It's also, I mean savage time is really all subjective
based on the time that's missed between injuries and timeouts
because they don't stop the clock, so they just kind
of guess like how much time.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
There's no media timeouts, so that makes it even worse, right,
So anyway, but this comes from a from a soccer story.
Lionel Messi has said he's been struggling with his fitness
up on his return from a suspension, and he was
critical of Major League Soccer for not letting him compete
after he and Jordi Alba were given one game suspensions
(03:55):
for skipping the All Star Game. Official MS rules were
attached to the Fury in recent days, and it was
revealed to be an incredibly upset in the aftermath of
the ruling, and apparently this is part of their Players
Association agreement that if you're elected to the All Star Game,
you have to go and participate, and if you opt out,
(04:16):
you're going to miss a game and a paycheck, which
is their way of saying, show up at the All
Star Game. Now in the NBA, I don't think we
have to worry about the All Star Game because all
the players enjoy that weekend. I'm sure there's other players
that are not All Stars that enjoy four days off,
but for the most part, they enjoy that weekend. They
enjoy being around their contemporaries. But I think if we're
(04:38):
not going to fix load management by extending the season
to where we only have three games a week, which
I've been suggesting and thinking about for fifteen years, then
maybe it's time to make sure that players are actually
in need of load management and if they're and figure
out legitimate injuries as to why or why not they're playing.
(05:01):
Maybe basketball in the NBA needs an injury list, just
like Major League Baseball does. Oh you're hurt, Okay, we're
gonna give you a five game injure list. That way,
people that are getting ready to buy tickets know not
to buy them if they're coming to watch you play.
And this goes back to making sure that when a
fan turns on the TV or a fan turns up
at a game, that the people that they're paying to
(05:23):
see are actually there. Now, obviously you can always have
a doctor say well, yeah, he is medically hurt and
he's not able to perform. But then you can have
another doctor that would have a different opinion, because they
all have different opinions from time to time. But if
we're not going to fix the schedule, maybe we only
give players x amount of load managed games a year
(05:45):
before it starts costing them game checks. Now, the NBA
has a collective baring agreement that says, if you're injured
and can't play, you still get paid. You get paid
every game you play, you get one to eighty second
of your paycheck. Playoffs and preseason is free, and playoffs
you get money from a bonus pool. So we got
(06:06):
to fix load management. And I'm wondering if we start
to look more with more scrutiny those who are load
managing and figure out do we need to find them
or do we need to take away part of their
salary for not for missing a game after they've missed
x amount of games because of load management.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
I wonder though, like how much money really is the
motivation of some of this, only just because we have
seen with the like for instance, with the midseason tournament,
the winning team gets five hund thousand dollars. If you're
a bench player, then that misses a lot more money
than than the main guys on your team. But a
lot of times the main guys and your team are
the ones we're concerned about with load management, right, like Kawhi,
(06:46):
Leonard Lebron jamestephf Right, whoever it is, right, So I
only think the money's going to motivate the bottom earners.
The top earners already make so much and guaranteed money
that I don't think money is really going to motivate
it as much.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
But I do. Like, you get suspended for fighting or
some kind of discipline, you lose your salary for that game.
It goes to the charity pool, right, and whatever one
to eighty second of your salary is. That's basically suspended
without pay. That's what you're you're facing. So my thought is,
do we ever punish a player for load managing when
(07:19):
we know he's not really injured. If you're really injured,
I don't want you to play because I don't want
you to injure career, but you got to stop load
managing just for the sake of load managing.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yeah. I remember, like a couple of years ago, Zach
Collins was on the injured on the injured list with
a paper cute or something like that. So injuries are
very subjective based on what the team is going to
report it as anyway, right, And some teams, and you've
seen this, some teams are much more protective of managing
these players load management than others like. It feels like
the bigger brands want their players to play almost all
the time. The lower brands, I mean and the Spurs
(07:52):
are kind of like, you know, whether we like it
or not, we're kind of more of a lower brands successful.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Here's the other thing. Tim Ducan when he started to
do load management was in the last four or five
years of his career, and it's far different for somebody
that's thirty five compared to somebody that's twenty two. I
guarantee you whenby will load manage one or two games
this year, and he won't want to, but Mitch Johnson
and the staff will make him do it. Yeah, And
(08:17):
I don't want if the player wants to play, I
don't think they should load manage. I don't. And again,
if we go back to a realistic schedule playing every
other day or playing every second or third day, based
on a three game a week schedule, then the players
are going to have enough time to rest to go
out and play. And obviously if you move this out
(08:38):
to twenty seven twenty eight weeks and played three games
a week and players still load managed, then we'd have
to figure out do they really care about their craft?
And I just don't know how you go about figuring
out whether the player's faking an injury or actually I'm fine,
but I want to load manage tonight. No, we're back
to back, and we should never have a back to back.
(08:58):
We should have a back to back night. Those so
much and you're going to get the schedule here in
two weeks and the Spurs will have about twelve or
thirteen back to backs, and they'll have one or two
three games in four nights or three games in five nights,
and that's just crazy. And then one of those games
is a Thursday night game or a Saturday night game.
And now every night of the week is supposed to
be a Prime game or a Netflix game or this
(09:20):
game or that game, and you're kind of watering down
the importance of all the regular season games. And half
these games are third of these games the star players
aren't going to play, and that's going to be detrimental
to the success of the league. I know you don't
care about a game in December at the same rate
that you care about a game in April or May,
(09:41):
but you got to pretend that you do and at
least show up and give me twenty minutes. All right,
we've talked for ad nauseum about live golf. How about
live NBA. We'll talk about that next. It's the Indy
Everett Show. On the ticket.
Over the years, you have heard me talk about load management,
and a lot of people give the Spurs credit for
the ones that invented load management based on the fact
that they sent Tim Toni and Mono home on a
commercial flight one year when they were playing in Miami.
What people forget about that infamous night was that it
(00:27):
was the fourth game in five nights.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
It was the.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Seventh game I think of a nine day road trip,
and it was the ninth game on the road in
like ten or eleven games or something like that. It
was a ridiculous schedule that the Spurs were on, and
I think it was a protest from poping the Spurs
to the league enough. I don't care what you find us.
(00:52):
These are world class athletes and we're running them into
the ground now. We used to do this yesteryear in
the eighties, where teams traveled on commercial flights, and that
I can't imagine an NBA team or a professional team
flying commercially these days. It is it is chaos to
have as many people as they need to take with
(01:13):
them on these road trips.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Tried to do with a baby.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Well, it's one thing when you're doing it with a child,
but exactly. I know what you mean, but you have
there's a limited time between gates when you have to
make a connection. And the old rule back in the
day in the NBA was that you could not they
could not fly southwest. Back in the day, that was
(01:37):
taboo because they didn't have first class seats. And the
NBA Players Association agreement was that in less the players
unanimously voted, then you could not fly up on a
plane that didn't have at least twelve first class seats,
and they preferred the ones that had, you know, eighteen
to twenty, so that the coaches would set up there
as well staff and video guys and further down there.
(02:01):
And they didn't take that many assistant coaches back in
the day. Usually it was one or two, maybe three,
and a trainer, your radio guy, and your PR guy
and that was about it. And so now they take
thirty thirty five people on a road trip and to
try to navigate through customs and TSA and baggage checks
(02:22):
and all that kind of stuff. You're getting up at
three o'clock in the morning to catch a five thirty
flight so that you can get to the next city.
And you always had to take the first flight out.
So but we always say, you know, we did a
lot of things differently in the eighties and nineties than
we do now. And look how much longer careers like
Larry Bird and maybe even Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson
(02:44):
could have lasted had they not necessarily load managed. But
they had the conveniences of flying charter and the nutrition,
the things that we know now that we didn't know
back then. So just because we did it in the
old days doesn't mean that it's good. It doesn't necessarily
mean that it's bad either, but it doesn't mean that
it's good. So, and I'm going to preface this segment
(03:06):
by telling you I know nothing about soccer except that
it takes the ninety minutes to play, and they have
something called stoppage time, and nobody knows exactly how much
the stoppage time is except the one ref that's keeping
track of it. And you don't know if you how
many seconds you have to score the game winning goal
in a zero zero or Neil Neil game.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
It's also, I mean savage time is really all subjective
based on the time that's missed between injuries and timeouts
because they don't stop the clock, so they just kind
of guess like how much time.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
There's no media timeouts, so that makes it even worse, right,
So anyway, but this comes from a from a soccer story.
Lionel Messi has said he's been struggling with his fitness
up on his return from a suspension, and he was
critical of Major League Soccer for not letting him compete
after he and Jordi Alba were given one game suspensions
(03:55):
for skipping the All Star Game. Official MS rules were
attached to the Fury in recent days, and it was
revealed to be an incredibly upset in the aftermath of
the ruling, and apparently this is part of their Players
Association agreement that if you're elected to the All Star Game,
you have to go and participate, and if you opt out,
(04:16):
you're going to miss a game and a paycheck, which
is their way of saying, show up at the All
Star Game. Now in the NBA, I don't think we
have to worry about the All Star Game because all
the players enjoy that weekend. I'm sure there's other players
that are not All Stars that enjoy four days off,
but for the most part, they enjoy that weekend. They
enjoy being around their contemporaries. But I think if we're
(04:38):
not going to fix load management by extending the season
to where we only have three games a week, which
I've been suggesting and thinking about for fifteen years, then
maybe it's time to make sure that players are actually
in need of load management and if they're and figure
out legitimate injuries as to why or why not they're playing.
(05:01):
Maybe basketball in the NBA needs an injury list, just
like Major League Baseball does. Oh you're hurt, Okay, we're
gonna give you a five game injure list. That way,
people that are getting ready to buy tickets know not
to buy them if they're coming to watch you play.
And this goes back to making sure that when a
fan turns on the TV or a fan turns up
at a game, that the people that they're paying to
(05:23):
see are actually there. Now, obviously you can always have
a doctor say well, yeah, he is medically hurt and
he's not able to perform. But then you can have
another doctor that would have a different opinion, because they
all have different opinions from time to time. But if
we're not going to fix the schedule, maybe we only
give players x amount of load managed games a year
(05:45):
before it starts costing them game checks. Now, the NBA
has a collective baring agreement that says, if you're injured
and can't play, you still get paid. You get paid
every game you play, you get one to eighty second
of your paycheck. Playoffs and preseason is free, and playoffs
you get money from a bonus pool. So we got
(06:06):
to fix load management. And I'm wondering if we start
to look more with more scrutiny those who are load
managing and figure out do we need to find them
or do we need to take away part of their
salary for not for missing a game after they've missed
x amount of games because of load management.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
I wonder though, like how much money really is the
motivation of some of this, only just because we have
seen with the like for instance, with the midseason tournament,
the winning team gets five hund thousand dollars. If you're
a bench player, then that misses a lot more money
than than the main guys on your team. But a
lot of times the main guys and your team are
the ones we're concerned about with load management, right, like Kawhi,
(06:46):
Leonard Lebron jamestephf Right, whoever it is, right, So I
only think the money's going to motivate the bottom earners.
The top earners already make so much and guaranteed money
that I don't think money is really going to motivate
it as much.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
But I do. Like, you get suspended for fighting or
some kind of discipline, you lose your salary for that game.
It goes to the charity pool, right, and whatever one
to eighty second of your salary is. That's basically suspended
without pay. That's what you're you're facing. So my thought is,
do we ever punish a player for load managing when
(07:19):
we know he's not really injured. If you're really injured,
I don't want you to play because I don't want
you to injure career, but you got to stop load
managing just for the sake of load managing.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yeah. I remember, like a couple of years ago, Zach
Collins was on the injured on the injured list with
a paper cute or something like that. So injuries are
very subjective based on what the team is going to
report it as anyway, right, And some teams, and you've
seen this, some teams are much more protective of managing
these players load management than others like. It feels like
the bigger brands want their players to play almost all
the time. The lower brands, I mean and the Spurs
(07:52):
are kind of like, you know, whether we like it
or not, we're kind of more of a lower brands successful.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Here's the other thing. Tim Ducan when he started to
do load management was in the last four or five
years of his career, and it's far different for somebody
that's thirty five compared to somebody that's twenty two. I
guarantee you whenby will load manage one or two games
this year, and he won't want to, but Mitch Johnson
and the staff will make him do it. Yeah, And
(08:17):
I don't want if the player wants to play, I
don't think they should load manage. I don't. And again,
if we go back to a realistic schedule playing every
other day or playing every second or third day, based
on a three game a week schedule, then the players
are going to have enough time to rest to go
out and play. And obviously if you move this out
(08:38):
to twenty seven twenty eight weeks and played three games
a week and players still load managed, then we'd have
to figure out do they really care about their craft?
And I just don't know how you go about figuring
out whether the player's faking an injury or actually I'm fine,
but I want to load manage tonight. No, we're back
to back, and we should never have a back to back.
(08:58):
We should have a back to back night. Those so
much and you're going to get the schedule here in
two weeks and the Spurs will have about twelve or
thirteen back to backs, and they'll have one or two
three games in four nights or three games in five nights,
and that's just crazy. And then one of those games
is a Thursday night game or a Saturday night game.
And now every night of the week is supposed to
be a Prime game or a Netflix game or this
(09:20):
game or that game, and you're kind of watering down
the importance of all the regular season games. And half
these games are third of these games the star players
aren't going to play, and that's going to be detrimental
to the success of the league. I know you don't
care about a game in December at the same rate
that you care about a game in April or May,
(09:41):
but you got to pretend that you do and at
least show up and give me twenty minutes. All right,
we've talked for ad nauseum about live golf. How about
live NBA. We'll talk about that next. It's the Indy
Everett Show. On the ticket.
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