Gregg Popovich On Resting Players: ‘It’s Complicated…Like Health Care’

The topic of resting players has joined the MVP race as the hottest story in the NBA right now. Commissioner Adam Silver reportedly sent a memo to team owners, warning them that teams are in danger of facing “significant penalties” if they don’t provide adequate notice that a team intends to rest its players.

Last week, LeBron James came out and said that rest didn’t become an issue until he started doing it and that Spurs coach Gregg Popovich has been doing it for years.

Popovich talked at length about resting players and Silver’s warnings and agreed with the sentiment that if teams are going to rest a player, they should do it at home. Pop, who is very much in tune with the country’s political landscape, also said that the issue is, “Complicated…kind of like health care,” a nod to President Trump’s ACHA Bill that did not pass on Friday.

From ESPN:

“The one comment that I’ve heard that makes a lot of sense, is that if you’re gonna rest somebody, if you can do it at home, then you should. Like, we’re resting Danny Green tonight,” Popovich said. “Danny Green is not LeBron James, but if we rested Kawhi [Leonard], if there’s a way we could do it at home, that seems like a logical thing to me; a reasonable thing that a coach or GM should think about, rather [than] that one time somebody’s gonna watch him play someplace else, if you can do it. Sometimes the schedule dictates differently. But that makes sense to me. So I think there can be areas like that where we come together and try to make everybody happy. But that’s why no basic rule has been written, so to speak. Because you can’t write a rule that covers everything. It’s complicated … kind of like health care.”

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