What Load Management Is Really a Dispute About
Stripped of the medical vocabulary, the disagreement is about who the regular season is for. Teams treat it as qualification, a long and partly disposable process whose purpose is to arrive at the playoffs intact and well positioned. Fans and broadcasters treat each game as a product sold on its own terms, complete in itself. Both readings are defensible and they cannot both be fully honoured on a compressed calendar. That is why the durable fixes are structural rather than rhetorical, and why the argument surfaces again every time the schedule tightens.
