During Floyd Mayweather Jr’s boxing career, fans used to complain about their viewing experiences watching Mayweather put on mundane, defense-oriented fights one after the other. Now ironically enough, Mayweather is complaining about his viewing experience with another sport.
During a recent Q&A session with The SportsIcon Lion Club, the retired boxing great Mayweather shared his one big gripe about the NBA — that players take too much time off to rest.
“What I don’t like, what’s going on with athletes nowadays, the NBA players, they’ll play a couple games and take a couple games off,” Mayweather said. “That’s not cool. With that type of money, if you’re not hurt, you need to be out there playing because these people pay a lot of money for these NBA players to entertain.”
“Load management” has certainly become a common (and divisive) practice in the NBA over the last several years. While the argument goes that players like Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Kobe Bryant regularly used to play all 82 games in a season, the counterpoint is that basketball is more physically taxing to play these days with the quicker pace (compared to the ’90s and ’00s), the need to defend all the way out to the three-point line and past, and the evolution of athletes to become stronger and more explosive.
As for Mayweather, he is a big NBA fan who often sits courtside at games, even going viral in recent months for some of his ridiculous outfits. Perhaps Mayweather’s complaint here is rooted in one too many times that he has missed out on seeing a top star play thanks to a maintenance day off.
Photo: Sean Michael Ham/Mayweather Promotions
