Nick Nurse certainly knows what it takes to coach in the NBA's load management era.
Prior to the 2018-2019 NBA campaign, the Toronto Raptors, then led by Nurse, traded franchise cornerstone DeMar DeRozan, starting center Jakob Poeltl and a first-round pick that would become Keldon Johnson to the Spurs for one year of Kawhi Leonard, who was all but predestined to leave in free agency after a season in Canada.
An NBA champion with the Spurs, Leonard and his handlers came to resent San Antonio for its refusal to submit to a “load management” regimen that would regularly rest the star forward so that he could stay healthy for the playoffs. The Raptors had no such quibbles with Leonard's desired modus operandi, which resulted in nothing less than Leonard leading Toronto to its lone NBA championship.
Leonard only appeared 60 games during that regular season, but averaged 30.5 points while playing in all 24 of the Raptors’ postseason contests. The NBA’s load management era thus began in earnest — and is poised to continue in the most brazen way possible with Nurse’s current team, the Philadelphia 76ers.
‘Teams Don’t Worry About Wins as Much’
In an article published by ESPN earlier this week, Joel Embiid, a former league MVP who won Olympic gold this past summer, remarked that there was “one thing missing” on his resume: “To win a championship.”
In order to get there, Embiid has made it clear that he intends to do whatever it takes to follow in Leonard’s footsteps and enter the postseason fully healthy, a state of being that’s eluded him for much of his career.
"If I had to guess," Embiid said, "I would probably never play back-to-backs the rest of my career."
According to 76ers president Daryl Morey, same goes for the team’s splashiest offseason acquisition, Paul George.
"We're going to be smart about it," Morey said. "Part of being smart about it is having both Paul and Joel probably not play many back-to-backs, if any."
For his part, Nurse noted that Philadelphia wouldn’t get caught up in the amount of regular-season wins they finished with as long as they qualified for the playoffs.
None of this has been lost on oddsmakers.
“These teams don't worry about wins as much any longer,” Johnny Avello, DraftKings’ director of sportsbook operations, told Action Network. “The seeding's not that important anymore. It's all about winning the whole thing. If you're good enough, you don't care about seeding. It's let's just go into the end of the season healthy and win an NBA championship.”
Avello doesn’t personally buy into the theory that seeding doesn’t matter, which helps explain why Oklahoma City and the New York Knicks have shorter odds than the Sixers to win the NBA title and finish with the league’s best regular-season record. (The defending champion Boston Celtics are favored in both markets.)
"If you look at our futures book, we've got the Celtics (+185 reg. season/+310 title) as the favorite again,” said Avello. “They're deep and the guys play a lot of games. The OKC Thunder (+370 reg. season, 7-1 title), they're the second choice. They're loaded up. The Knicks (+850 RS/8-1 title), they look like they're gonna be a contender, then the Sixers (11-1 RS, 9-1 title) are behind them.
“There are a lot of teams that could win this. I think a deeper team has a better chance because you have a good, quality team that can play every night. Seeding could be really important. I think it does matter, so we're going by the talent and depth of the teams."
‘Major Adjustments’
Prior to last season, the NBA declared that in order to be eligible to win an individual award like Most Valuable Player, an athlete had to play in at least 65 regular-season games.
While simply skipping a game in every back-to-back wouldn’t, on its own, deprive Embiid of an opportunity to claim his second MVP award, his ESPN admission makes it clear that the honor isn’t important to him — and DraftKings’ odds (25-1) reflect that.
"He couldn't care less about it,” said Avello. “He's won everything except an NBA championship. If you've already decided you're not playing-back to-back games and you're a little injury prone, that's why he's 25-to-1.”
Take away those factors and, Avello said, “He’s gotta be the second or third choice, right there with [Luka] Doncic (+370) or [Nikola] Jokic (4-1), but that's not something he's pointing to. Doncic and Jokic play almost every single game."
Sixers aside, Avello said Milwaukee (14-1 to both win it all and finish with the league’s best record), with an injury-prone big three either over the age of 30 or about to hit that milestone, and the Los Angeles Lakers (30-1 title/130-1 reg. season), with the aging LeBron James and fragile Anthony Davis, have been two of the toughest teams to price in various markets due to their singular focus on the postseason.
“If guys decide to take off back-to-back games, I respect that,” said Avello, “but we as oddsmakers have to make some major adjustments."
