The most important discussion that there is right now in the NBA is the one of the next schedule and, especially, on which day to start playing. While the League prefers to do it on December 22, since playing at Christmas he would win 500 million more, players prefer January 18, giving them more time to rest after a season that has taken a year to resolve and some ended less than a month ago.
This is the case with the Heat and the Lakers, the two teams that reached the finals. Some players from the Los Angeles team, such as Jared Dudley and Danny Green, have already made public their opposite position to start before the end of the year. The second alluded to LeBron James, implying that in the case of starting so early the star would hardly step on the track during the first weeks. Now it has been LeBron himself who, in an apparently joking tone, has confirmed that the shots could go out there.
It has been on the HBO show that he presents with Maverick Carter, The Shop, in a chapter in which the guest was Barack Obama. The former president was invited to talk about the upcoming elections, the importance of the vote and the role that his conversation with Lebron and Chris Paul had in convincing the players to continue in the Disney World bubble when they had the boycott attempt to protest against a new case of police brutality. It was at the end, with the opening credits popping up on the screen, that Carter reminded LeBron that “the season was coming” and if he had “five or ten more years” of basketball left, because that was the impression he had left in Orlando.
Obama intervened to give his opinion on what was going to happen: “You know what? I’m sure he’s going to have a minute restriction. I’m not sure he’s going to come down to defend the first half of the season.”. LeBron, laughing, upped the ante: “The first half of the season … I’m going to be harvesting cherries the entire first half of the season.”, something that Obama seems to approve of: “You have to be healthy when you really need it”.
All this conversation in a casual, joking tone and with laughter in between, does not reflect anything other than reality. That of a 35-year-old player who has just played one of the best seasons of his life playing practically every minute, in a year in which the course has lasted almost 365 days for him. LeBron has been more than 1,000 minutes longer than any other player in playoff history, and his MVP rating throughout the season speaks of little left to go. Can you do that again with just two months of separation between one season and another, when the normal is that there are four? Although Perhaps the question is not whether it can, but whether it should.
It is likely that both he and the Lakers are considering the option of load management, the minute restriction for players who want to reach the playoffs fresh. So that the Lakers do not suffer in that case, Obama has the solution and also made it known to LeBron: “Let Anthony Davis do all the work”. The King’s reply is not wasted: “Yes, that’s what we have him for”.
