APBRmetrics

If Silver really wanted to come down hard on this presumably growing practice (anyone have the total counts for DNP Rest for league by season and by team?), he could dock team's share of the revenue for that game proportional to the salary of the guys not playing. Rest LeBron, lose 20-25% of game revenue share.

Or tell teams they can only use DNP Rest in home games or non-national TV games.

Or limit how many times it can be used per team or player in a season without special permission from league.

Here is a lot of the data before this season
https://www.sportsnewsempire.com/nba/sc ... -dnp-rest/

Haberstroh reported smaller numbers.

The size of the practice isn't huge either way though it has grown a lot. Use in national tv games is probably the most troublesome piece of the practice. Maybe start with owner agreement on that. Even more effort to schedule team rest before national tv games or just to pick national tv games where the rest is there would be appropriate and maybe sufficient.

In some recent examples of the practice there is the suspicion of coaches ducking big games, punishing specific rival fan bases (perhaps tit for tat) or thumbing their nose at national tv and the league to show they are in charge. If coaches wanted to, they could alter how they do DNP Rest and cause less outcry than they have.

Unfortunately with the ability to flex games, the pure number of nationally televised games, the subset of teams that the networks actually want to show, and the fact that the schedule is created and then the networks chose games based on that schedule it will be hard to fix this problem with a solution that is directed at nationally televised games only. I guess the league could try to guess which matchups the networks would like to see and then try to make sure that if they schedule those match-ups on a nationally televised night, the teams have rest beforehand.