Cut NBA pre-season and spare the top players

Product will suffer if league’s stars continue to get hurt

TORONTO • Unless you live through it, you cannot feel it. NBA players have played 82 games over the course of 5½ months for quite some time. Players are conditioned to it, and fans are conditioned to it. We expect it, and they expect to endure it.

Yet, empirically, that demand is too much for the human body to take. Those back-to-back games can be killers. NBA players do not get enough sleep and are in a job that demands peak physical performance.

“Going back to back, five games in seven nights, in the dead smacking middle of winter, January or December, you feel it,” Raptors reserve Chuck Hayes, entering his 10 th NBA season, said Monday. “Travelling takes a toll on your body. Getting into cities at two o’clock in the morning — that’s not proper rest. It’s taxing, but it’s well worth it.”

It is hard to deny that last point: NBA players get paid well, and it’s all tied directly to the revenue the league derives from their efforts.

Nonetheless, if the league’s best players continue to get injured — and it is the best players, who play the most for their teams and internationally, who are at the greatest risk — the product will suffer. If the product suffers, it might generate less revenue. With that in mind, a modest proposal: shorten the interminable pre-season and lengthen the regular season — in days, not games. It would not fix the issue, but it would naturally build in a little more rest for players.

In an extensive study on the league’s schedule, ESPN’s Tom Haberstroh revealed in a September story that there are 578 back-toback sets of games this season, an average of 19.3 per team.

More than 96% of those require overnight air travel, as the league requires teams to arrive the day before a game, presumably to avoid travel issues that could pop up if they were allowed to arrive the day of a game.

The number of back-to-backs is actually up from last year, ironically because the league extended the allstar break in order to give players more rest. Whoops.

Of course, the league is unlikely to shorten the pre-season. This is when a large share of the NBA’s international games take place, which are a massive opportunity to generate money. Even at home, preseason games produce meaningful revenue, too. As players become more and more aware of the benefits of nutrition and good health, they now rarely arrive at training camp out of shape.

“Shorten it one week, two games,” Hayes suggested. “This would be our last week. Instead of [starting the regular season] next week, we’d start this week.”

The coaches might have their own complaints, too. On Monday, Dwane Casey was bemoaning the Raptors’ execution on the glass. Certainly, he does not want to give up any practices.

However, in such a scenario, he might not have to — the timing of them simply would change. Teams inevitably practise less and less as the season goes on because of injuries and the compact schedule. For example, teams almost never hold practices the day after backto-back games, and rarely have pre-game shootarounds before the second game of a back-to-back set. If the schedule were elongated, there might be more natural days to schedule practices.

“If you’re a young team, you’re looking for eight [pre-season] games. If you’re a veteran team, a team that has been together [with] continuity, you could get by with four games,” Casey said. “A team like ourselves, we could possibly get by with a shorter length. But if I’m taking this team over, a young team that’s developing, I need as many games and practices as I can to get it together. You have a great argument both ways.”

In the end, it does not feel like Hayes’ suggestion of trimming a week is enough. The league could probably shorten the pre-season by 10 days or even two weeks, and the players and product would likely be all the better for it. The accountants might have something to say about it, though.