Does load management really give the opposing team an advantage?

There’s little doubt that load management is a real thing in the NBA. It almost comes as a surprise to turn on a game and find all of the top players in uniform. We can debate whether this is good for the game or fair to fans, but it isn’t going away.

There’s another aspect of this to consider, though. Every time a coach decides to rest one of his star players, he does so knowing that night’s game will be a little tougher to win. The flip side is that there’s a coach on the other bench whose job got much easier. You would think that over the course of a season, this would even out, but that turns out to be far from true.

Load management gives the opposing NBA team a competitive advantage.

To see if that’s the case, I checked the season game logs for the top fifty scorers in the NBA on Basketball Reference. For the purposes of this exercise, I assumed that any player who missed two or more consecutive games did so because of an injury and that absences of one game were for load management purposes. By this standard, the top fifty scorers had a total of 139 load management games through Sunday night.

Here’s what’s weird, though, and what could skew the playoff race down the stretch. Twelve of those 139 games came against the Oklahoma City Thunder, three more than any other team. That means the Thunder have played almost a fifth of their games against teams that have voluntarily rendered themselves shorthanded. Maybe that wouldn’t matter if the Thunder had done what everyone expected and tanked the season away. But OKC currently sits just half a game out of a playoff spot in a race where every game stands to be critical.

Now consider the teams that are bunched right around OKC in the standings. The New Orleans Pelicans, one game ahead of OKC and beset by injuries of their own, have played just three games this season against teams that rested their stars. Portland, tied with OKC, has also played just three such games. And the Lakers, half a game ahead of OKC, have played just two!

Does this matter?

Oddly enough, the Thunder have won just four of the twelve games in which their opponent rested a top scorer, including a 3-5 record at home. Does this mean OKC has squandered an opportunity to gain ground? Or does it mean they would have done even worse in those games if the other team had been at full strength? More likely, it is just a function of a young team that has struggled to maintain a consistent level of performance, regardless of who they are playing or who suits up.

Another question that comes to mind is this: If load management is some scientific process that calibrates the precise point at which a night off would best allow a player to recharge his body and maximize his performance in upcoming games, why do those games come against Oklahoma City so often? Wouldn’t the opponents even out, at least a little, over the course of a season? Why has only one top 50 scorers sat out against Indiana all season?

The most logical explanation is that the Thunder looked, at least early on, like a team you could steal a win against without playing all your stars. Plus, there’s the reality that, with all due respect, what happens in Oklahoma City doesn’t get as much attention as what happens in Los Angeles or New York, which might be why the Lakers, Clippers, Knicks, and Nets have as many star opponents sit out combined as OKC alone.

Add to that the fact that OKC plays a scrappy, chaotic style on both ends that isn’t easy to get into a groove against, and you can imagine players or coaches deciding this is the right time for a night off.