I’m not going to go to work today. Not as a result of illness or injury, but due solely to the idea that I might get sick or injured in the workplace.
Sound crazy?
If it doesn’t, it should. But in today’s NBA that’s the approach to playing, and if that sounds like a good gig — you’re not wrong.
I don’t typically like to play the “comparing professional sports to everyday jobs” game, but in this case I believe it applies.
The average rate of pay in the National Basketball Association is $10.5 million per year.
Additionally, 15 players make more than $50 million per; 11 more make more than $40 million; 23 more make more than $30 million; and in all, 144 players make more than $1 million per month in a calendar year.
That’s a lot of cheese despite what Odell Beckham and Carmelo Anthony have recently told us, and Patrick Ewing told us decades ago when he said amidst the NBA’s work stoppage that “People complain that pro athletes make a lot of money, but what they don’t understand is that we need a lot of money because we spend a lot of money.”
Well said, if disconnected buffoonery is your thing. But tone-deaf if you understand the difference between rational thought and the nonsensical rationale of young millionaires who’ve been convinced that the world does in fact revolve around them.
Injury is part of everyday life. As someone who recently had a knee surgery as the result of decades of wear and tear, I get that.
People also get sick on the regular, and in most cases they make it to work. In fact, often they haven’t a choice, for their impending employment depends on it.
But while injury comes with the territory for professional athletes, and that’s in part why they’re paid handsomely to do what most only are allowed in their dreams, the players have somehow convinced themselves otherwise.
Somewhere along the line, NBA players lost their way in regards to what they do and what comes with that territory.
Athletes get hurt. Since the dawn of time, if you run, jump, throw or grapple with others in the interests of competition, you will injure an ankle, knee, foot, shoulder, you name it.
But while today’s athletes are more than aware of the physical risks that come with the games they play, they’re not familiar with the fact that those risks are part of the contractual agreement that come with the fruits of their labor.
NBA players and their union representation have spent the better part of this decade telling you how hard they have it.
This isn’t your dad or granddad’s league, they say, but rather a new and improved one that requires harder work, therefore in return requires more rest.
And while the league plays 82 games, its superstars typically play 65 or fewer, not as the result of injury, but as a means of avoiding it.
LeBron James recently said in an interview that, “The way we play with the level of pace and speed we play at, it’s a different game now. It’s a lot of soft tissue injuries now because of it… when I first came in the league, the biggest concern for injuries was like a high ankle sprain… Now you see the new high ankle sprain is the calf.”
He used such as an argument for load management, as well as advocating for a shorter season.
Well, you can forget the shorter season, for there’s virtually no chance that a team owner or its players would sacrifice the money lost from cutting 17 games from the existing schedule. That’s 21 percent fewer games, which would mean a 21 percent pay cut for players who in many cases already feel like they’re underpaid.
Then there’s the revenue lost from ticket sales, concessions and merchandise from having eight to nine fewer home games.
Ain’t happenin’.
So, that leaves LeBron and the rest of his whining and sniveling brethren to arbitrarily sit games, leaving ticket-holders and fans of the teams left to pay the price for what amounts to a watered-down product.
This past week, San Antonio traveled to Los Angeles to play the Lakers, pitting LeBron and Luka Doncic against Victor Wembanyama and his up-and-coming Spurs. Unfortunately for fans of the league, teams and players, the two Laker stars sat, in addition to fellow starters Austin Reeves and Deandre Ayton, along with Marcus Smart.
That didn’t sit well with this guy, but likely sat worse with the ticketholders who spent hundreds to thousands of dollars to watch what on paper should’ve been a game between a handful of the league’s biggest draws.
And that shouldn’t sit well with the league commissioner Adam Silver either, but he seems to have less answers for that and other league problems, despite the growing number of questions surrounding the league and its progression going forward.
This is a problem, and has been since Kawhi Leonard famously convinced people it was a necessary evil beginning in 2018.
So is tanking, but that’s a rant for another day.
Both however are behavior unbecoming for a league, and its players, who seem more interested in defending their problems than rectifying them, and like load management — that seems crazy too.