Last week, I was sitting in a VIP seat in the Ryōgoku Kokugikan National Sumo Arena in Tokyo, completely awed by the spectacle. It was Day 5 of a two-week national tournament. Shady internet dealings helped me procure this VIP ticket, all for me to see large athletes slap and push each other around.
I was unprepared for how much I’d enjoy the ceremony’s passion. A 10.5-hour day in the arena wasn’t enough by the end. Seeing the impact of these behemoths slamming into each other — in the most refined of all Neanderthal-esque displays of brute strength and athleticism — ignited an ardor I didn’t know I had. It was also spectacular to see a raucous sumo-loving crowd live and die with each of the biggest battles’ results. That passion was born from scarcity. These tournaments happen only six times in a calendar year.
Economist Thomas Sowell once said, “There is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it.”
The NBA has lost the plot in its flawed Potemkin Village-esque attempt at implementing the Player Participation Policy announced last week. The league seeks to curb teams resting healthy stars on paying customers’ behalf, namely for nationally televised games.
As Tom Haberstroh perfectly stated, teams can get around this “policy.” There are plenty of loopholes, such as saying a veteran star is battling an injury and needs rest. The new policy’s design is the league’s good faith effort to show current and prospective broadcasting rights partners why they should spend even more billions for NBA matchups.
“Don’t worry about the stars missing games! We’ve [legally] addressed that!”
Practically, though, it’s tough to predict how much load management will be curbed. How seriously will the league take this policy in a year? Once the new broadcasting deals have been finalized, will this even be enforced? Is it just the new flop warning
Agent and league expert Nate Jones recently mentioned on Twitter (I’m not calling it “X”) that players hate the imposed rest by teams, as organizations almost overemphasize protecting their nine-figure investments. But Mark Cuban responded to Nate’s point, which I found to be the crux of the issue:
“The league has optimized the schedule to minimize the number of back to backs. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it also reduced or eliminated the number of three-days-or-longer breaks a team had. Which was great for recovery for heavy-minute players. It’s impossible to get both.”
It is impossible to get both … in an 82-game season. Haberstroh has often called for a 58-game slate (each team plays twice) to create scarcity that drives year-round interest. It’s how you theoretically drive up ratings and try to mimic football’s hold on its fans.
Fifty-eight games is too extreme a cut, but are you down for about 70 games? That would solve many issues — sans owners giving up money, of course. But money can be made up through patience, scarcity driving up product value, and ratings-driven broadcasting negotiations down the road. Ask any head coach about an NBA owner’s patience, though.
Instead, the league sticks to 82 games despite stars not doing that anymore. Policy or not, teams will keep doing what’s best for players. The league wants more ratings fervor, which doesn’t happen without scarcity. It will continue wrestling with this issue for the foreseeable future.
If the Warriors sign Howard, it would finally unite him with Chris Paul, which initially seemed possible during their respective primes in the early 2010s. You might remember David Stern vetoed a trade to send CP3 to the Lakers, Pau Gasol to the Rockets, and Lamar Odom, Kevin Martin and Luis Scola to New Orleans.
CP3 was a Lakers player for about two hours in 2011 before NBA owners reportedly pressured Stern into vetoing the trade as the controlling ownership group of the Hornets. The league purchased the team from George Shinn, who couldn’t afford to run it. So, owners had the legal power to veto trades involving the Hornets.
It was a big feces storm on Twitter, but back before Twitter became the cesspool it is today. The plan was for the Lakers to put Paul alongside Kobe Bryant and get Howard as he exited Orlando in 2012. Using Andrew Bynum to entice a deal for Howard might have worked, and the Lakers seemed to always get their guys back then.
Instead, the NBA — just two weeks after ending the 2011 lockout — decided the trade couldn’t happen. Now? The Warriors might get a second-unit version of CP3-Howard at a combined age of 75 years old.
