The only solution to the supposed epidemic of resting star players is to stretch the NBA season out a few weeks so there are fewer crowded stretches on the schedule.

Playoff-bound teams are already resting players – it's a trend which has grown in recent years and will only become more prolific.

Any time a coach decides to give one or more of his stars a night off, there will be a story about the kiddie who travelled hundreds of kilometres for that one night to see their favourite player in action.

Nobody likes to get disappointed when they fork out big dollars for an NBA ticket but sometimes when you go to a big event, you get the understudy instead of Bette Midler in Rochelle, Rochelle.

Golden State, Memphis and Atlanta have recently started following the lead set by San Antonio mentor Gregg Popovich and given some of their main performers nights off even when they have no specific injury concerns.

LeBron James took a couple of weeks off midway through the season and has been phenomenal since his return, helping Cleveland surge into the second seed in the Eastern Conference.

It's never fair to compare anyone to Michael Jordan but the old-school thinkers point to the Chicago Bulls superstar as evidence that players don't need to rest to make it through an 82-game season. Jordan played all 82 games nine times during his 15-season career, including his Washington swansong in 2002-03. He only played less than 78 in the regular season in 1985-86 when he had a serious foot injury (18 games), when he made his comeback from baseball (17) late in 1994-95 and his first year as a Wizard (60) in 2001-02.

Perhaps if Jordan did take some games off during his first stint with Chicago from 1984-93, he wouldn't have had the overwhelming feeling to walk away from the game at the age of 30 to walk onto the baseball diamond. There were many other reasons, including his father's murder, cited by Jordan at the time but burnout was definitely a factor.

Maybe he wouldn't have felt the need to retire again at the age of 35 in 1998 when he still had a few more years left in him although he said at the time the main reason for hanging up his Air Jordans that time was the decision by the Bulls to jettison coach Phil Jackson.

The climate has changed in recent years. Coaches won't be going back to the old ways of playing their stars excessive minutes on every night they're available. The only coach who seems to be in denial about rest and restricting minutes is at Jordan's old team, Chicago's George W Thibodeau. He gets away with it because he keeps getting the Bulls into the playoffs even though his team has been dogged by injuries although there have been several reports suggesting club management is fed up with his style of coaching.

Sports science is all about peaking at the right time of the season. Coaches know nobody cares about a random match against Orlando in March but everyone remembers how their team goes in the playoffs.

The NBA has paid lip service to its scheduling problem by trialling a 44-minute game in the pre-season and floating the idea or reducing the season from 82 games. Neither option should or is going to happen. Changing the length of matches or the season means every record in the history book will need an asterisk to denote which era any given feat occurred in.

There is no fix-all solution to the rest issue. If it was a 41-game season with no back-to-back matches you could still see someone like Popovich giving one of his veterans a night off just to ensure they had a few more miles in their legs for the playoffs.

If the NBA cut the pre-season of eight games per team in half and started the season in mid-October instead of at the end of the month or early November, then teams will have fewer horror calendar stretches where they have back-to-back matches or the dreaded run of four in five nights.

Why not?