NBA Commissioner Adam Silver Calls Resting Star Players ‘An Extremely Significant Issue’

Credit: ESPN

The NBA has a problem. Teams around the league are becoming far too comfortable with resting their star players regardless of whether games are nationally televised or not. NBA commissioner Adam Silver appears to be ready to prevent this problem.

According to Ramona Shelburne of ESPN, Silver thinks stars resting when healthy is a significant issue for the league:

NBA commissioner Adam Silver has called the practice of teams resting marquee players “an extremely signifcant issue for our league” in a memo to league owners Monday obtained ‎by ESPN.

The really started a few years ago when head coach Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs decided to rest all of his star players in a marquee matchup in a nationally televised game. Obviously, that’s not ideal for the network the game was aired on nor the league itself.

Since Popovich made the move a few years back, other teams have gone with the same tactic. Basically, teams are trying to keep their players fresh for the NBA playoffs and don’t want to risk injury in a game that doesn’t impact they all that much in the standings.

Although an argument can be made for both sides in this dilemma, the fact is these athletes get paid millions upon millions of dollars to play a game on a nightly basis during the regular season and need to be on the floor when fans are buying tickets, and people tune in to watch their favorite players.

With Silver coming out publicly to make this statement, changes will almost certainly be on the horizon in the NBA.