Adam Silver defended the concept of NBA teams resting players when asked about 'load management' by David Rubenstein, who is co-executive chairman of multinational private equity firm The Carlyle Group.

"Now, load management means that players don't really play that much compared to what they could play," said Rubenstein. "In other words, they want to rest themselves up. They just want to take a day off. What is that?"

The term 'load management' was first used by the Los Angeles Lakers when LeBron James sat out a game at the Golden State Warriors shortly after returning from a groin injury.

"I think you're overstating it a bit," replied Silver. "I mean, load management, this concept, I mean, it is what it sounds like. It's, in terms of managing the load on players, the load being the amount of minutes they play. I would say most of our top players are still playing virtually every game.

"I mean there's actually an article in the Wall Street Journal today about Kawhi Leonard, about how - that he, I forget the precise number of games, I think he missed something like 20 games this past season. But I think - the story - they say it. But what is unusual about Kawhi is he missed almost the entire prior season. So he was recovering from an injury almost the entire season. And what people are pointing to right now is that he's playing great. I mean, they haven't won anything yet. But, you know - and he's playing a lot of minutes in the playoffs.

"And that article suggested that maybe that's a strategy other teams should be following. But I would also say with the Philadelphia 76ers, Joel Embiid missed almost the same amount of games this season and we'll see what impact it has on him. 

"So I just think load management is come more to mean in the NBA - it may mean that, you know, every, you know, 15 games or something like that, you may not play. And I only say, and even from a fan standpoint, from a league standpoint, and the science is not quite maybe what people may think it is here, I think we all thought in terms of our best players if resting a player every 15 games or something like that.

"If legitimate resting of players resulted in them being healthier in the playoffs, healthier longer, able to continue their career longer, I think we'd be in favor of it. This last issue is, though, then as a league, we may need to revisit the number of games in the season. Because maybe in the modern NBA, we've had an 82-game season for roughly 50 years. And maybe it's too many games on the player's bodies.