DNP-Rest is the real MVP of this NBA season, as teams are selectively sitting key players more regularly to manage wear and tear amid a long season. As the debate over whether sitting healthy stars rages, Flanns and Zillz discuss the issue in a macro and micro sense.

ZILLER: The Cavaliers, who have been to two straight NBA Finals series, caught heat for resting their three big stars in Memphis last week. As the Cavs only play in Memphis once per year, and as LeBron is the biggest star in the world, this was a big deal to some fans from the Bluff.

Predictably, some folks in the media business are raging against the Cavaliers' decision to sit the stars. People have called the new DNP-Rest paradigm a crisis. But really, this is only about LeBron. I can't really think of another major star who would draw this level of outrage for his absence.

Perhaps if the Warriors sat the entire starting lineup minus Zaza Pachulia, folks in an Eastern Conference city would get mad. But really, it's not Kyrie Irving (who has been injured with some frequency) or Kevin Love (whose Wolves never drew anyone on the road) that people are mad about. It's that they paid money to see LeBron and didn't get to because his coach decided to rest him.

There's no compromise available here. The league cannot force LeBron to play every night, nor should they. We'll get into the broader DNP-Rest topic, but what do you think about the Memphis conflagration?

FLANNERY: My broad view is that coaches should have full discretion to manage their players' rest as they see fit. Health is the only variable that matters in the playoffs. The. Only. One.

We see it year after year and then we forget all about it in December because some adorable child can't see his favorite player on a Wednesday night. Honestly, if I had a 30-something MVP candidate with almost 40,000 minutes on his odometer, I'd never let him play in a back-to-back.

The one thing that I thought was strange was that they rested everybody on the same night. Why not stagger the rest and run out a representative team with a chance to win?

ZILLER: Good question. Before I answer that, I want to point out a key line in your response. In most cases, this is the coaches or teams more generally who are dictating rest, not the players themselves. So, to hear the usual retired stars puff their chests out about how they'd never sit while healthy is just irrelevant. The coaches are developing rest schedules and strategies.

I suppose players could revolt against them (as Allen Iverson, who famously didn't like to practice, implied), but the players are smart enough to know resting is a good strategy. The old men raging against the pampered millennials? Just noise.

On the staggered rest vs. leaving everyone home point: the godfather of the DNP-Rest, Gregg Popovich, has done it both ways. And in fact, his decision to leave his stars all at home for a national TV game vs. Miami a few years back is really the only example of the league having a policy on resting stars. (In retrospect, that appears to be one of David Stern's more arbitrary decisions.)

Why would you sit them all together instead of resting them one at a time? Part of it is that most coaches rest based on the presence of a back-to-back or a four-in-five set. The other rationale is that you'd rather significantly decrease your win probability in one game of 82 than moderately decrease your win probability in two or three games of 82. It's a numbers game to some extent. Ty Lue explained his decision by noting particular maladies each of the three stars were dealing with.

That's another issue with the idea of legislating this strategy: if you ban or penalize DNP-Rest, teams will just list an actual injury when they sit a star. DNP-Back has the same result as DNP-Rest. Why force teams to lie?

FLANNERY: Right. Remember the old injury list when everybody had tendinitis? Now it's just an inactive list and when players sit, we generally know why they're out.

We've really got two problems here. There's too many games and not enough time to play them. The 82-game schedule is here to stay, but the latest collective bargaining agreement pushes the start of the season up by a week to spread things out a bit. (I still think six preseason games is at least two too many.)

So, what's the league to do?

ZILLER: I actually don't think shrinking the schedule to even 66 games would eliminate the DNP-Rest. NFL stars don't rest because their season is 16 games long. A single game is just not that determinative in a macro sense in the NBA (even if some races come down to one game by April) and the trade-off of taking health is just too real.

I don't think this is really a problem. Those fans in Tennessee would have been in the same boat had LeBron twisted his ankle the night prior. When you buy a ticket, you have no idea what you're getting. It could be LeBron, it could be The Kay Felder Show.

I don’t think this is really a problem. ... There are issues greater worth our concern than that.

Its not great to drop $800 to take your kid to a basketball game and not get the show you thought you were getting. But there are issues greater worth our concern than that. (I'm reminded of the folks who dropped thousands of dollars getting into Hamilton, only to find out a principal was taking a night off. You can wallow, or you can make the most of it.)

Do you think the league needs to do anything?

FLANNERY: No, not really. I know some folks are up in arms about this, but resting players is a perfectly obvious strategy. Hell, I'd say it's a mandate when you have a top-10 player and expect to go deep into the postseason. It's a nine-month season counting training camp and the finals. Players get days off in baseball all the time and no one freaks out.

And who's complaining here? Dipshit talk show hosts who are better left ignored and retired players who live for these kind of get off my lawn moments. No one in the history of the world ever had it harder than a jock who retired at least 10 years ago.

ZILLER: [drops the mic on behalf of Flanns]