If You Hate Load Management In The NBA, Blame The Fans

NBA Load Management is a contentious topic. Just the mention of it will earn you an earful from some basketball fans. Can you blame them? It is incredibly frustrating. You buy a ticket to a game, hoping you are going to see your favorite player, and then it comes out that the player will be sitting on the bench. Not because they are injured, but for rest.

Going to a Sixers-Lakers game to see Joel Embiid and Lebron James, only for neither to play, is annoying. No one could blame any fan, especially one who paid money to go to the game, for being angry that happened.

Usually, fans take out their frustrations on the player himself. Is that fair though? Are they really who we should be blaming for load management?

Tyrone Johnson talked about his subject off the back of Joel Embiid missing the Sixers home opener. For him, this all started with the way fans treat the modern-day Super Star.

"What we did was we created a scenario in which a player without a ring was called a loser. We did that. Then after we did that, we didn't think there be any consequences from it.

What we could have done is say, Chris Paul, top three all-time in assists, and top three all-time in steals, he is a great player. Just came up short in the championship. Like we said about players in the previous generation. But instead what we said was 'loser.'

So what we said was that all of these regular-season accolades don't matter. We told the players that. So you know what the players said? Well, then I just got to try to win a championship because you don't care about anything else. We did that.

To make it clear, Tyrone was not saying he loves Load Management, or it is what you need to do to win a championship. The day before saying this, he and Ricky Bo questioned some of the Sixers' logic in how they handled Embiid.

But he did want to point out the why. The why is fans themselves have acted like the regular season doesn't matter. If you are the best player in the world for 82 games, but then your team comes up short, you get called a loser. So should we be surprised the players put less value on regular season games when the fans themselves don't seem to value it?

Tyrone did leave it off with an idea of how to fix it though.

"Now we can reverse that. But that will require us to look at the regular season and actually praise the players."

Yesterday we looked at what the Phillies would look like if they could only sign local players. It was not pretty. They had a few superstars, but most of the team got filled out by guys who were either known for not being good or not known at all. The problem was Philly isn't exactly the best place to be a young baseball player. In Florida or California, you can play baseball all year long. But here, Baseball is mostly just a Spring and Summer sport. Basketball is different though. Philly and South Jersey know Basketball. So would a Sixers team built out of local guys end up looking better than the Phillies?

Philadelphia, and the surrounding area, have been home to some NBA legends. Kobe Bryant, Wilt Chamberlain, Earl Monroe, Rip Hamilton, Rasheed Wallace. Philly could build an All-Time lineup that could rival most cities. But we are not talking about All-Time rosters here. We are seeing what the current Sixers team would look like, and none of those guys are still playing today.

Can they still put together a good roster of local guys though? Are the active players hailing from East PA, South NJ, and Delaware enough to make the Sixers a competitive team? Or will we be grateful Free Agency and the Draft exist and we can have guys from Cameroon, Texas, and New York on the roster? I can at least say it turned out better than the Phillies did.

We put together the best Sixers team we could from the pool of players who grew up in the local area. Like with the Phillies roster, the criteria to qualify is just that you are closer to Philly than any other NBA City.

Lowry is not the player he once was. Several years ago you would be excited to start off with Kyle Lowry as your point guard. But not everyone is Lebron James and can continue to dominate into their late 30s. That said, Lowry is still a solid player. He is shooting over 40% from 3 to this point in the season, and can still be a facilitator.

Sixers fans have coveted him in the past. We have also hated him in the past when he was doing his usual antics against the Sixers. But if he had been a Sixer his whole career, he would likely be beloved. Not just because he is a local but because he is the type of guy you hate to play against, but love to root for when he is on your team. 

Bridges would be the star of this team. And it still hurts to think he could have actually come home and played for the Sixers. They drafted him. He was wearing a Sixers hat and talking about how happy he is to be a Sixer. Then they traded him for a package that included the draft pick they eventually used to get Tobias Harris. And for the first couple of years. Harris was the better player. But now that Bridges is on the Nets, and allowed to be the guy, we see just how good he is.

He is an All-NBA caliber defender and scores over 20 points per game. Philly fans loved him on the Suns and Nets. They would adore him had he stayed in Philly.

Another solid player to add to the starting lineup. Hunter is no star, but he is a guy you love to have on the roster. Hunter has been around a 14 ppg guy his whole career. On that end of the floor, he can make a difference. His defensive game however leaves a ton to be desired. But playing next to Mikal Bridges should help cover up some of those issues.

The Morris brothers are Philly through and through. Even after they moved on to new cities when drafted, they continue to be a big part of a community, focusing charity efforts on their hometown, doing things like making sure every student has backpacks, haircuts, school supplies, vision care, and more. Marcus finally came home this year in the Harden trade. While neither of them are the same guy anymore at 34, we can still see Marcus has something left in the tank.

Lively is currently enjoying a solid rookie season. The 12th overall pick out of Duke averages 8.6 points, 7.8 assists, and 1.5 blocks in 25.1 minutes per game. In his one year at Duke, he got All-Freshman and All-Defense honors. He has a chance to grow into a solid NBA player. Would it be nice to have a more sure thing at center and let Lively grow behind him? Sure. But the pool of active big men to pull from in the local area left a lot to be desired.

You could do a lot worse than having Lonnie Walker as your main guy off of the bench. Walker averages 14.6 points per game this season off of the bench with the Nets and has been a double-digit guy for the past several seasons. Like Hunter, he is not good defensively. And this likely will not be a good defensive team in general outside of Bridges and Lively. But they may be able to put up some points, and Walker will help with that.

Like his brother, Markieff is not the player he once was. His fall-off is even greater than his brother's. He is down to just 7 minutes per game and has only played 3 games this year with the Mavericks. But the Sixers needed a big guy off the bench, and he was the best available. So they unite the Morris brothers on one roster.

Bones Hyland loves playing in Philly. He put up 21 on the Sixers, including 4 3s, in a 114-110 Nuggets win. Maybe there is something top playing in front of his friends and family from Delaware that takes his game to another level. And maybe that would give the Sixers a big boost off the bench. He can also provide solid defense at times. Hyland is a solid player and would be a plus player off the bench for this version of the Sixers.

Cam Reddish had a lot of hype at times. But it hasn’t quite worked out anywhere he went yet. Which is why he has bounced around between 4 teams. But there is still skill there. He has the tools to be a starter. But he lacks consistency. He eventually fell out of the rotation with the Knicks for that reason. But it is definitely worth having him off the bench to hope you can pull that potential out of him.

I was expecting a huge Nova presence on this team. But so many of the guys we remember from those great Nova teams aren’t actually from Philly. Jalen Brunson is from New Brunswick. Josh Hart is from Maryland. Seddiq Bey is from North Carolina. So they end up with Lowry, Bridges, Gillespie, and Arcidiacono. Gillespie has yet to make an impact in his rookie season with the Nuggets. But he was a ton of fun, and clutch as hell, when with Nova.

Arcidiacono was a superstar at Nova. But he has yet to turn into anything in the NBA. Now in his 7th season, he has never averaged more than 6.7 points per game. But just keeping a job that long in the NBA is impressive. In this case, he would be on of the last guys off of the Sixers bench. That has been his role wherever he went so far in the NBA, so he might as well do it for the home team as well.

Dion Waiters has been out of the league for a few years. But in this case, Sixers would have a very limited pool of players to pick from. And if they were looking to round out their bench, a guy who has been a bucket at some points in his career would be hard to pass on. He is still only 31, and has been a double-digit points guy in the poast. In this case, it would be worth having him off the bench to see if he can help.