How Olympics allowed Lakers to load manage injuries for LeBron James, Luka Doncic, Austin Reaves, Marcus Smart

2026-02-10 · Yahoo Sports

How Olympics allowed Lakers to load manage injuries for LeBron James, Luka Doncic, Austin Reaves, Marcus Smart originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

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NBA teams aren't supposed to load manage players and sit them out during nationally televised games.

The Los Angeles Lakers got a huge solid from the Winter Olympics on Tuesday to allow them to avoid that part of the player participation policy.

You see, the Lakers play the Spurs on Tuesday, and that would've been NBC's West Coast game on its slate.

Except that NBC has the Olympics to broadcast, and so it won't have primetime, national NBA on this particular Tuesday.

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Because of that, the Lakers aren't bound by that player participation policy.

And because of that, they're sitting four major players:

LeBron James
Luka Doncic
Austin Reaves
Marcus Smart

This is how Rob Perez explained it on X:

This is the first Olympics Load Management ever, I would assume.

No NBA on NBC tonight due to the Winter Olympics coverage on the network, which means the stars are not violating the player participation policy re: appearing in nationally-televised games. Spurs/Lakers would have… https://t.co/zwlh1EL314
— Rob Perez (@WorldWideWob) February 10, 2026

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NBA teams do find ways around the policy, as well. But in this case, the Lakers didn't even have to do anything sneaky.

They could just rule the players out with no worries about punishment or backlash.

They can shout the Olympics out for that.

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