RUH ROH! The NBA has a trend. The best, and worst, teams are, oh you know, sort of mailing in entire games, and intelligent life form Adam Silver, who played Roger in American Dad, is not happy about it.

First it was the Spurs who would rest Tim Duncan and their other 400-year-old stars.

And then the Sixers started tanking.

And now the Lakers are tanking and everyone else is sitting the their best players and saving them for the playoffs.

The league is on the defensive.

Silver, who hails from the planet Forkton, famously forced the family Colangelo upon the Sixers and then awarded them the top overall pick in the draft as a conditiion of their cooperation to put a stop to their tanking, ostensibly.

Last week, we noted how Lakers coach and son of a pothead Luke Walton claimed he wasn’t tanking even though the Lakers’ two highest paid players are riding the pine. Reader (@Whoa_Bundy) literally complained to the league about it and, incredibly, got a response back in which a fan relations rep claimed that the blue sky Whoa observed was, actually, burnt sienna:

Uh huh. Sure.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum (the winning end), the Cavs and Warriors and others have taken to resting their stars as they gear up for a playoff run, and Silver has sent a (David) stern warning to owners. From The Comeback:

“In the memo, Silver informed teams that the issue will be a prime topic of discussion at the next NBA Board of Governors meeting April 6 in New York and warned of ‎’significant penalties’ for teams that don’t abide by the league’s standing rules for providing ‎’notice to the league office, their opponent, and the media immediately upon a determination that a player will not participate in a game due to rest.’”

Significant penalties. Yeah, like this guy:

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Photo credit: Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

Let’s bring it full-circle and through the looking glass on this issue: According to The Comeback, the league was not happy when the Cavs decided to sit LeBron James, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love in a national TV game against the Clippers.

Around here, we have some experience with that pressure to play on national TV thing. The Sixers allowed Joel Embiid to play on national TV against the Rockets after an MRI discovered that he had a torn meniscus. Embiid, as you might have heard, hasn’t played since, won’t for the rest of the season, and may need surgery.

I doubt Silver intervened in the Embiid situation, but the issue of teams being overly cautious with, but also feeling the need to play, their star players feels familiar. The NBA has a problem on its hands. BIG SCIENCE has discovered that playing ~100 high-level basketball games per year can wear on the human body. So teams, sans the ability to reduce their schedule, are sitting their stars, and BIG MONEY and BIG TV don’t like it. Me? I can’t wait to see the collective outrage when LeBron gets a stress fracture for playing in the second game of a back-to-back.