Star NBA Players Sitting Out Regular Season Games

Having had my fill for a little while of the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch...and straying from the ongoing headline news story about today's terrorist attack on London, I checked in to ESPN and heard Stephen A. Smith and his interchangeable cohort go off against each other about National Basketball Association star players being given "off days" by their respective coaches and sitting out entire games...even those advertised by major networks for show on TV.  It's gotten so bad now that sometimes almost the entire starting lineup won't play...in essence forfeiting that game and, in my opinion, cheating the paying fans the opportunity to see the high caliber of basketball that they shelled out their money for.  The rationale for a lot of this off-time is that the season is too long and that too many games are played back-to-back...with this train of thought goes concern for the players' health.  And after all, it's the playoffs and not the regular season that counts, right? 

If the 82-game NBA regular season is only there to establish eligibility for the playoffs and create a seeding system for the 16 teams that make it, and everyone's so concerned about the players' health...then why not reduce the number of games, then?  Do we really need that many games...or is the sport instead way too greedy?  I suspect the latter is the real reason for the status quo in pro basketball here.  If you can take around 200 teams in college basketball and devise a 64-team tournament that few events in sports can challenge for its mass popularity...and accomplish this after most teams have played regular seasons of only 24-27 games, it seems to me...unless of course money is the only thing they're interested in...that the NBA playoffs could be lined up after a regular season of, say...around 50 games.  That would still be about twice the number as the college version, and think of all the "off"-time that the big-shot multi-millionaire stars would be enjoying.  On the other hand, if the regular season has to be kept at 82 games, then why have playoffs at all?

Why not have the teams in the league play each other the same number of games and let the team with the best record be crowned champion...or let the playoffs be limited to a championship series between the two conferences' regular season champions?  Overseas professional soccer leagues don't use playoffs to determine their champions and they are still wildly popular over there.  This way, the games themselves would count and you wouldn't see all these games with starters on the sidelines throughout.   And also, let the worst finishers in the league be relegated to a lower-status league in order to reduce the incidence of teams...such as reputedly the 76ers...flopping in order to achieve a high draft status for the next season...

But the bottom line here is that, if the coaches and star players themselves don't value the regular season, then why should I or any other fan?  When I tune in to a game like the other night and see a whole row of perfectly healthy, monumentally-paid starters sitting back on the sidelines joking around with one another while their team on the court is losing by 25 points, then I would say we've got a problem here...