There’s a stat lingering in the background of this year’s NBA Finals that will present commissioner Adam Silver some discomfort and challenge. It boils down to these numbers: 14 and five.
The 14 is the number of games the Raptors held out Kawhi Leonard because of "load management." He missed 22 altogether, two for personal reasons and six for a variety of small injuries (sore foot, hip bruise, sore knee), but it is the 14 healthy scratches that should most concern Silver. Those scratches indicate that when the Raptors planned out Leonard’s season, it was predetermined that he was not going to appear in more than 68 games.
As for the five, that’s the number of total games that the Warriors’ star core of Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Kevin Durant and Draymond Green were held out during the season for the stated purpose of managing loads.
NBA FINALS PREVIEW:
Predicting Warriors vs. Raptors series
The Raptors rested Leonard consistently throughout the year. Since the season ended, he has been the clear MVP of the playoffs, a dominating force on both ends of the floor who has gotten better as April turned to May and could do the same as May turns to June.
Leonard’s scoring leapt to from 26.6 points to 31.2 points with 50.7 percent shooting and 38.8 percent 3-point shooting. That’s an improvement on his regular-season numbers, a rare thing in the playoffs, where NBA scoring drops from 111.2 points per game to 107.6 and shooting goes from 46.1 percent to 44.2.
The Warriors have a reputation for resting players throughout the season, but truth is, they don’t do it all that much. During their five-year dynasty, Curry has missed only four games because of rest, Thompson has missed five and Green has missed eight. Durant has missed only one game for rest in his three years with the team.
Now the Warriors enter the NBA Finals a bit haggard, even if they’re coming off a sweep of the Trail Blazers and will have had a rejuvenating 10-day rest since finishing off the Western Conference finals. Durant is out with a strain of his right calf dating back three weeks, the second time this season he has suffered that injury.
Both Curry and Thompson battled ankle injuries at the end of the first round of the playoffs and into the second round, though neither has missed a game yet this postseason.
The lesson here is that no matter what Silver and the folks in the NBA office do to remove the stain of teams resting healthy players in games for which fans and broadcasting entities still had to pay full value, he can’t legislate the issue away, despite league efforts to spread the schedule and drastically reduce back-to-back games.
Space things out however you like, it will still pay off in the spring to have players sit out in the winter. Leonard is Exhibit A there.
The Raptors rested Leonard for 17 percent of the season and got a fantastic, historic postseason out of him because of it. There’s likely no way that Toronto would be opening the NBA Finals on its home floor if it were not for the way Leonard was rested.
The league’s other 29 teams have surely taken notice — maybe Giannis Antetokounmpo (one rest game), James Harden (zero rest games), Damian Lillard (one rest game) or other stars could have been more Kawhi-like if they’d had an increase in load-management games. Last month, Silver said the issue of "load management" remains a thorny one.
"I’m never quite comfortable where things are at," Silver said, noting that he heard complaints from teams about players getting days off in the final week of the season while playoff seeds were at stake. "We always have one eye, too, that we know that the playoffs are what this is all about. So we don't want to end up forcing a team to do something silly when it could cause issues in terms of health for the most important part of the season."
MORE: "Lack of trust" led to Kawhi’s trade demand with Spurs, uncle says
The one hope that Silver has here is that Leonard was a unique case, a guy coming back from an injury he insisted was severe and playing for a new team desperate to keep him in town. There was skepticism in San Antonio last year about just how bad the quad injury that caused Leonard to miss 73 games was — teammates said Leonard would look fine in practice, then sit out anyway — and it was that skepticism that finished off an already fractured relationship between player and franchise.
The Raptors, knowing they’d need to fully back Leonard if they wanted any chance to re-sign him as a free agent this summer, treated Leonard’s injury with extreme delicacy and attention to detail. He was handled the way a team would handle a young player coming off knee surgery or a blown Achilles. Not every player requires such coddling for a quad injury, so perhaps Leonard’s 68-games-or-less season will prove to be a one-off.
Finding ways to build rest into the NBA’s demanding schedule has been on the mind of Warriors coach Steve Kerr going back to last summer, when he went so far as to consider cutting out the tradition of gameday shootarounds altogether. He knew coming into the year he’d give frequent rest to two key older reserves, Andre Iguodala and Shaun Livingston, and that new center DeMarcus Cousins would need special treatment as he recovered from Achilles surgery.
He still had the problem of Curry, Thompson, Green and Durant, though. None of them particularly wanted to rest — Durant actually fought the team on resting a game during the season’s final week and only gave in when he had the flu — even if it might be beneficial in the long haul.
"We’ve basically, what we’ve done is Shaun and Andre, because of their age, they just get occasional nights off," Kerr told Sporting News. "DeMarcus is just not going to play any back-to-backs because of coming back from the Achilles. And then Steph, Klay, Draymond and Kevin, they’ve all been given one or two nights off where it just felt like they needed it. We’ve handled it as well as possible."
Kerr, in the end, did not do anything drastic with shootarounds or his approach to practices.
"More than anything, we’ve just lightened the load," he said. "More days off, fewer practices. We still have to hit on the fundamentals. You have to practice shooting every day. You have to practice your defense every day. Most days, anyway. We’ve probably done more film work and less court work, just to keep the wear-and-tear off their legs."
Now they’re here. Even with some bumps, bruises and Durant’s calf strain, the Warriors’ star players have pretty much met or exceeded their regular-season numbers during the playoffs and enter the Finals as the favorites to win the championship. They’ve done so without a whole lot of in-season games off.
But what Leonard has done in these playoffs — and just imagine if he continues it in the Finals, if he pushes the Raptors to compete with or even beat the Warriors — has been remarkable. It’s not the kind of thing that Silver wants to hear, but as this series gets underway, Leonard has given load management a good name.