NBA on cutting edge of rest
Mike Zarren, the assistant general manager of the Boston Celtics, told a story recently about a team practice in which the coaching staff had been urged to take it easy on the players.
It’s not an uncommon thing in today’s NBA. Teams with sport-science staffs — the fancy new word for “trainers” — have paid increasing attention to the fitness of their players, even at the expense of the practise of tactics. So: don’t wear them out too much. Big game tomorrow.
In this instance, as Zarren relayed, the coaches kept everything in the half court. No running up and down the hardwood, the NBA’s version of wind sprints. Instead, nice and easy.
And when the sports-science people looked at the data from the biometric sensors that are also not uncommon in today’s NBA, they discovered that the half-court practice was more taxing.
“Oh, yeah,” said WNBA star Sue Bird, sitting on a panel next to Zarren: “Those are way worse.”
It is from stuff like this that the new controversy about the trend toward resting star players was born. “New” is not quite accurate, actually. The San Antonio Spurs have been resting their stars regularly for years now, but with the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers — the NBA’s two top draws — following suit, the league is having a mild stroke, with commissioner Adam Silver sending a memo to owners asking them, in so many words, to do something about it. A Spurs-Warriors game two weeks ago in which all the stars were rested, turning a heavyweight fight into Boxcar Willie versus Glass Joe, was presumably the impetus for Silver to weigh in.
But, that horse is so far out of the barn it is two meadows over and still on a mad dash for freedom. The question is not whether the NBA will reverse the trend toward more rest, but whether other pro leagues will follow its lead. Will an Edmonton-Toronto game two years from now potentially include healthy scratches Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews?
The root of all the drama, as is often the case these days, is data. Where the dreaded spreadsheet has ushered in change in terms of tactics and roster construction in all sports, far more information about players’ physical well-being is now also available to teams. They routinely employ biometric sensors during practices and to monitor sleep, and the result is a flood of data that was previously unimaginable. Where a coach used to have to eyeball a player in practice and consider whether he was fatigued — which for many would have led to the conclusion that the player simply wasn’t trying hard enough — now teams can look at hard evidence to get their answers. They can tell when a player’s acceleration has dropped, or when a top speed is flagging, and they can monitor stress levels on joints plus all the usual stuff like heart and breathing rates. Studies have shown that players are more susceptible to injury when they are not at their physical best, so the information isn’t just about keeping them fresh for games. It’s about keeping them from getting hurt.
Gregg Popovich, the Spurs coach and the NBA’s resident genius/coot, has said as much in defending his long-standing rest policy: They know that paying attention to the wealth of health data has prolonged the careers of players like Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobli, even if it means games when San Antonio fields a Bteam. Popovich acknowledged Silver’s worries the other day and said “we’ll all try to figure it out” while conceding that pro basketball is entertainment and that paying customers aren’t there to see the backups.
This still put him at the other end of the spectrum from Detroit’s Stan Van Gundy, who lamented this week thatplayersusedtoplay40-plusminutes “every single night” while flying commercial. Now, he said, “we take care of people better and yet they can do less.”
But, the bygone era is also littered with players who broke down early, or who never properly recovered from injury, or whose production fell off a cliff once they passed a certain age. Modern medical science has undoubtedly saved Steph Curry’s ankles and made age-defying wizards out of Steve Nash and Tim Duncan and Kobe Bryant. LeBron James might have been a freakishly durable freight train in any era, but the fact that he sits more often now cannot have hurt.
IntheNBA,therestquestioncomes down to numbers. What is more likely to increase the probability of winning a title: keeping stars healthy or making sure they play every night? If your team is good enough to get a top playoff seed even while conceding a few games, the answer is easy.
In the NHL, it seems less clear. The standings are more compressed, for one. And there’s more of a warrior culture. But headshots were celebrated not that long ago, and fighting was considered an intrinsic part of the game. Rest might end up being hockey’s next evolution.