Load management for dummies

So, you’ve decided you want to learn more about what this hoopla called load management is all about — congratulations, you’ve come to the right place.

The purpose of this guide is to take you by the arm, like you were being gently restrained for your own protection, and walk you through some day-to-day, real-life examples of load management, because the concept as it applies to basketball has proven too difficult for you to comprehend.

Here at the Dummies empire, we get that you aren’t really a stupid idiot, you would just prefer to have your information streamlined into one oversized yellow book where information is laid out plain as the damn day. After all, sports are supposed to be fun, and rigorous, and can you really trust that they are either when athletes you’ve paid good money to see aren’t running their tendons raw, night after night, at the whims of your own fleeting attention? But we digress. Get to the guide already! You’re probably screaming at this text. Buddy, we hear you, we heard you, we put the restraining order in and here we go.

It’s what the song ‘The Weight’ is all about

Levon Helm was a rock legend, he was also primarily concerned with the wear and tear professional basketball players face when contractually obligated to perform tasks that seek to defy the very laws of nature, 82 nights of the year. His most famous ballad was meant as a cautionary tale against the overuse of players during the early months of the NBA season, but unfortunately succumbed to its better-known identity, regular rotation on oldies to easy listening radio stations and sad singalongs on dive bar jukeboxes the world over. The lyric, “I saw Carmen and the Devil walkin’ side by side” is actually about Carmelo Anthony and his ruinous entanglement with Knicks owner James Dolan.

It’s why they keep inventing bigger pickup trucks

Ford F-150? Wrong, try F-650, and then when you do, try the debilitating dread on for size that comes with not knowing if you’ll be able to handle a haul or a load or the cargo of guilt that can accompany coming up short at any given moment in this life—4-wheel drive is a given, but 4-real drive is a gift.

It’s why Kyrie Irving is afraid of gravity

Many and more jokes have been made about Kyrie Irving’s apparent penchant for believing that the world is flat, but have you ever stopped to consider the possibility that Irving, when given a brief lesson on gravity and the force of attraction it exerts on every single thing living and inanimate in our known universe, realized not only that the weight of that knowledge, the load it represented, was too much to bear, but that the emotional implications, of all of us helplessly drawn and pushed away from one another, in a kind of paralytic dance that goes on forever or until the universe collapses in on itself into dust, less than dust, was going to seriously infringe on his personal fulfillment let alone ability to hoop to such a degree that he just decided to invest in an archaic theory long disproved for peace of mind and a shot at a decent endorsement deal? Plus, asteroids are scary as hell.

It’s why the league is introducing a new NBA Award for Mister Load Manager

A little bit of a Dummies exclusive here but word is the NBA, in an attempt to get out ahead of this load management crisis currently plaguing some of its most lucratively broadcast players, is going to invent a new award given to the coach who best quells the feverish insanity load management has brought upon the league. That is, the coach who insists no guy on their roster plays less than 45 minutes.

It’s why the postal system is distrusted by millions

Some believe that there is just no way the volume of letters and packages handled every day by the postal service could be managed by means of archaic transport such as delivery trucks and plain old walking. Most postal services do not have a fleet of their own planes. What could really move that much mail? A series of tubes underground? Teleportation technology not yet shared with the public braintrust and instead hoarded by the greedy minds behind Big Mail? There’s simply no way to know. Don’t get us started on letters to Santa.

It’s the heaviest element on the periodic table

Uranium, and you don’t wanna mess with it.

It’s why whales lost their legs

Millions of years ago, a small mammal the size of a house cat started spending more time in the water because it was getting hassled on land. Gradually, this animal got bigger, evolved to have denser bones to counteract the buoyancy of water, had its nostrils slide up its head to become blowholes, and decided things were a whole lot better underwater. Fewer hassles, less weight on its proverbial shoulders. Actually, it preferred the feeling of having no weight on its shoulders so much, it eventually evolved out of having them all together. Alex McKechnie studied early cetacean evolution before turning to sports medicine.

It’s what happens when your washing machine gets unbalanced

What do you mean, you’ve never done laundry? This isn’t BroBible, get it together.

It was going to be called Weight Watchers

For one, fewer off-color jokes. Plus, sounds cuter. The team’s mascot would dress up as Sherlock Holmes, go up to the offending player sitting on the bench in their formal resting clothes while the jumbotron flashed CASE CLOSED in a cartoony text. Everyone would laugh because they were coddled like children instead of admitting they were frightened of science. But then Weight Watchers, the food one, threatened to sue.

It’s why the Boston Basketball Partners, ownership group of the Boston Celtics, force every player into marathon watch sessions of Manchester by the Sea

Heavy storyline, heavy real-life exploits of Casey Affleck to reconcile with viewing experience, heavy use of a lot of drab, oversized jackets and homes with drab, beige siding. They can’t fly when watching, for the immeasurable weight of malaise exerted on the plane. They watch it submerged from ice baths. It’s a nightmare but judging by the Celtics’ record so far, it’s working.

It’s why Sisyphus pushed that rock around

Some people (Ancient Greeks) would have you believe that the reason the King of Ephyra, Sisyphus, was cursed with the task of rolling a huge boulder up a hill for all eternity was simply because of his self-aggrandizing nature—not the case! Sisyphus was actually one of the first people interested in low-impact, repetitive resistance training and its benefits. The ancient Greek basketball league did try to send him a memo advising him to stop, but he was always on that hill with the rock and the postal system was not what it is today (tubes).

It’s why the Lopez twins tried to fight a song

The last time Robin heard the mournful harmonica at the beginning of The Hollies ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’ he flew into a rage so blind he got 20 rebounds against the Sacramento Kings and the Knicks still lost the game. The last time Brook heard it he scored a career-high 33 points for the Nets, who lost by two points to the Bulls. While they are brothers, they also are heavy. They resent the part especially about carrying the other because they’ve tried and it just isn’t possible. Present and future franchises are warned not to play 1980s or 1990s movie montages around the two, or to take them out to especially sad bars, the results are impressive, but always crushing.

It’s why Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote the ‘My Struggle’ series

3,600 pages because he was so tormented by the concept of load management. It’s like, read the Dummies version, you brooding dummy!

It was briefly addressed in John Collins’ Wright Brothers tribute dunk of 2019

Though the dunk itself was a failure — riddled with costume malfunctions and Collins destroying one-third of the model plane in his trajectory from ground to basket  — it did impress upon the viewer the precarious dream of man unburdening himself from earthbound shackles and that a load not managed properly will implode your dreams or else embarrass you in front of Shaq.

It is literally the secret to life on earth

Pregnancy is essentially the most prolonged practice of load management in existence. Even after the baby is born, and the load exists outside the body, it will require management for a long period of time. If you’re lucky, that’s 17ish years and in this economy, it probably also means the load moves back in for a solid 10-15 more once it was supposed to be managed.