NBA Player Participation Policy: How Are Knicks Affected?

For the time being, Julius Randle is the only player on the New York Knicks' roster affected by new Player Participation rules unveiled on Wednesday.

There's no rest for the wicked ... and apparently not Julius Randle either.

The NBA unveiled a new "Player Participation Policy" on Wednesday, a regulation that's said to "promote player participation in the NBA’s regular season" and one likely made to combat the increasing trend of load management in the modern Association.

A release from the NBA dictates that "star players" are the "primary focus" of the new rules, with the term being defined as any player that appeared on either an NBA All-Star or All-NBA Team in the past three seasons. If a newcomer reaches the All-Star Game, he will gain the star player designation for the rest of the season.

Under the new rules, star players cannot sit "unless a team demonstrates an approved reason ... not to participate in a game." If a healthy player is removed, that team must fulfill several requirements, such as sitting no more than one star per game, balancing a star's one-game absences between home and road games, making nationally televised and NBA In-Season Tournament games a priority, and making the sitting healthy player visible on the bench. 

Exceptions will be made on a case-by-case basis for "injuries, personal reasons and pre-approved back-to-back restrictions based on a player’s age, career workload or serious injury history."

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From a New York Knicks perspective, Randle is the only "star player" on the roster and thus the only player currently subjected to the new policy, having reached two All-Star and All-NBA teams over the past three seasons (2021, 2023). But even with load management on the rise, Randle has often been apparently unwilling to engage in the concept.

Since enduring a broken tibia in his NBA debut with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2014, Randle has played at least 71 games in all but one of the last eight seasons (the outlier being the shortened 2019-20 season, when he played 64 of 66 games in maiden voyage with the Knicks). Randle was on pace to play all 82 games last season before a late ankle injury kept him out of the last five regular season contests. 

Of course, the new rules would also absorb any potential All-Star breakouts and the Knicks are rife with such candidates: many felt that Jalen Brunson was one of the biggest snubs of last year's festivities in Salt Lake City while many in New York have high hopes for RJ Barrett, who's fresh off a medal-winning run with Canada's men's national basketball team at the FIBA Basketball World Cup.

Randle's apparent willingness to take the floor will come up big for the Knicks this season: the team traded Obi Toppin, his top spell option at the power forward spot, to Indiana and his current replacement seems to be a combination of Isaiah Roby (working off an ankle injury sustained last season with San Antonio) and Josh Hart, who recently took on a larger interior role during Team USA's run at the World Cup in Asia.