Michael Jordan’s “Insights to Excellence” interview with NBC’s Mike Tirico on load management, which was not so interesting in itself (he said what you’d think), comes at an interesting time for the league.
On the morning news broke that Chauncey Billups, Terry Rozier and Damon Jones had been arrested for gambling-related allegations, I was texting with someone involved in the league who was downplaying the severity of the scandal and instead pointing to more pressing problems for the game.
“Load management? That’s an issue. The draft? Issue,” he said. “A few bad apples out of 750? Scandal?”
Only, the more you read the federalindictments, the more you begin to realize, Oh, load management and tanking — two of the league’s hottest-button topics — are intertwined with this gambling probe.
From one indictment:
“By virtue of his relationship with [a player matching the description of LeBron James], the Lakers and other NBA personnel, the defendant Damon Jones had access to non-public information, including medical information that had not been released to the public. On multiple occasions during the 2022-23 and 2023-24 NBA seasons, including as early as approximately December 2022, Jones sold or attempted to sell for profit non-public information to others, including to the defendants Eric Earnest and Marves Fairley … for the purpose of causing or enabling them to place fraudulent wagers based on the non-public information.”
(Remember that name, Eric Earnest, by the way.)
In other words, Jones was allegedly selling load-management information to known gamblers.
James and Anthony Davis rested for more than a dozen games in the 2022-23 and 2023-24 seasons. Extrapolate that across the league, and superstars are missing dozens — if not hundreds — of games to load management. Each one is not only an opportunity for a fan to miss the player he paid to see, but, as we learned last week, it is a chance for anyone with access to player-resting information to leverage it.
Years earlier, in April 2019, Billups and Earnest allegedly “organized and participated in” rigged poker games in Las Vegas “at which they defrauded victims of at least $50,000.” Years later, in March 2023, someone matching the exact description of Billups allegedly informed Earnest that his Portland Trail Blazers were planning on resting Damian Lillard and others in an effort to lose games moving forward.
In other words, Billups was allegedly sharing tanking information to the same known gambler.
During the 2020-21 season, when Kawhi Leonard and Paul George were poster children for load management, Billups served as an assistant coach for their LA Clippers. He assumed head coaching duties for the Blazers in 2021, and they proceeded to tank portions of the next two seasons.
If Billups wanted to share non-public information with gamblers, how many opportunities did he have? How many times did people in similar positions — players, coaches and other team personnel — have the opportunity to share load management and tanking info with anyone, including organized-crime figures?
It is that opportunity — and not just the alleged actions of Billups, Rozier and Jones — that should concern the league office. Each instance of load management and tanking is not just detrimental to the quality of the product on the court, it is a chance for any member of the association to be exploited.
“Me personally, that whole world was introduced a couple years ago, and I don’t think they took players into consideration, especially with the energy and the behavior that goes around gambling and how that directly correlates to players,” said Boston Celtics star Jaylen Brown, a vice president of the players’ union. “[…] We’ve got to deal with a lot of the extra negativity and scrutiny behind all the gambling stuff. And then on top of that, it creates more integrity issues, etc. So I’m not sure what the answer is going forward, but definitely something that people have got to spend more time having conversations about.”
Those discussions between the league office and its players’ association now must include the topics of load management and tanking and the NBA’s ability to combat both, limiting the chances that members of the association have to be exploited. Or else the integrity of the game will continue to be questioned.
The cat may be out of the bag on load management. There is some evidence that the strategy has prolonged careers of great players, as James and others have played into their 40s, though in January 2024, after the institution of its new Player Participation Policy, “The NBA sent data from an exhaustive study to its teams … that showed no link between load-managed players and a decreased risk of injury.”
Of course, the study did not draw the conclusion that load management doesn’t work, either.
In theory, load management benefits both a player and his team. Not only is a player theoretically available to his team for a longer period of time, the player is well-compensated for that extra work. And when money is involved, as we were reminded over the past week, systems will be exploited. It is not tough for any player over the course of a season to find some difficult-to-diagnose reason not to play.
How is the NBA to require a player’s participation if he can claim any increased risk of injury?
Tanking is another matter. The league has also taken steps to counter late-season losing by its worst teams, implementing the play-in tournament and flattened lottery odds. Last season was all the evidence we needed to prove that those measures had little impact, as “quiet quitting” — or the act of limiting starters’ minutes even when they do participate in games — became a new wrinkle to the tanking issue.
Several other ideas have been suggested, from Celtics vice president of basketball operations Mike Zarren’s randomized “wheel” to “counting wins instead of losses after the All-Star break” to an even more radical concept from Malcolm Gladwell. Each of them would better stem the NBA’s tide against tanking.
And perhaps it is time to adopt a revolutionary idea, for the gambling problem is not going away. While the league cannot legislate gambling out of our culture, it can address the issues that gamblers are exploiting, issues that have plagued the NBA for more than a decade — issues that Michael Jordan is addressing in his first real opportunity to share his gripes with the game to a national TV audience.
