NBA says ‘load management’ no longer supported by scientific data

https://theathletic.com/4954304/2023/10/11/nba-load-management-data-analysis-no-longer-supported/?source=thebounce_newsletter



NBA says ‘load management’ no longer supported by scientific data: ‘Every player should want to play 82 games’


By Joe Vardon and Sam Amick
Oct 11, 2023


A top NBA official said teams’ general practice of resting players to prevent future injury and extend careers — commonly known as “load management,” a term ingrained into the lexicon of the sport over the past several years as some of the biggest stars missed huge amounts of games — is no longer supported by scientific data held by the league.

Additionally, that same official, former NBA great Joe Dumars, said in sweeping remarks that American professional basketball needed to work to “re-establish” a culture of players attempting to play in most of the 82 regular-season games, as the league’s front office embarks on a stunning disengagement from something as commonplace the last few years as a 3-pointer or mega trade.

“Before, it was a given conclusion that the data showed that you had to rest players a certain amount, and that justified them sitting out,” said Dumars, now the executive vice president of basketball operations for the NBA, who was a six-time All-Star for the “Bad Boys” Detroit Pistons in the 1980s and 90s.

“We’ve gotten more data, and it just doesn’t show that resting, sitting guys out correlates with lack of injuries, or fatigue, or anything like that,” Dumars said. “What it does show is maybe guys aren’t as efficient on the second night of a back-to-back.”

Dumars added that the “culture” in the NBA should be that “every player should want to play 82 games,”

“Obviously everybody’s not going to play 82 games, but everyone should want to play 82 games. And that’s the culture that we are trying to reestablish right now,” he said.

The phrase, “load management,” was most infamously used to explain the occasional games Kawhi Leonard sat out during his lone season with the Toronto Raptors in 2018-19 to manage the wear and tear of a leg injury that had caused him to miss all but nine games of the previous year with the San Antonio Spurs.

The practice of resting players who are not obviously injured long predates Leonard, but it (along with the actual phrase of “load management”) spread like wildfire throughout the NBA over the last two seasons, with numerous stars being held out of the same games, often when they were broadcast on national TV, even though they were not obviously injured.

Teams have overhauled their training staffs with an emphasis on hiring people who could use data analytics to predict and prevent injury, to the point that it has become a cottage industry within the NBA.

To offer a hint of just how commonplace it had become, of the top 50 scorers in the NBA last season, only 12 played in at least 70 of the league’s 82 regular-season games. Not all of those games missed were due to load management, but it’s still far too many absences from a team sport built on the marketability of stars.

There was a January set of games in Cleveland last season, on a Friday and Saturday night, when the Warriors on Friday kept Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, and Andrew Wiggins out, even though only Wiggins was injured (the Warriors had played the night before). On Saturday, the Bucks kept Giannis Antetokounmpo and Khris Middleton out.

That’s six All-Stars out of action in one weekend of games in one city.


As recently as last February, during All-Star weekend, NBA commissioner Adam Silver rejected the notion that star players were missing too many games. He said, “there is real medical data and scientific data about what’s appropriate.”

But in September, as the league, in conjunction with its players’ union, created new policies to restrict when they may rest players who are not obviously injured, Silver changed his tune, saying “frankly, the science is inconclusive” and “we don’t see any statistical data suggesting that players increase their likelihood of getting injured as they go further along in the season.”

In addition to those new restrictions for resting players — which includes requirements for teams to document injuries players suffer — the league also set a new games-played requirement for eligibility for postseason awards, like NBA MVP.

Dumars added that all of the changes related to encouraging more player participation were reached with agreement from the players’ union. He repeatedly used the word “slippage” to describe how the league had gotten to a place where it had become cool for players to be held out of games, as though it was a status symbol.

“You get here by not addressing it,” Dumars said. “You get here by slippage, by just slowly — year after year after year … just slowly over time — you see all this slippage in missing of games during the regular season, the All-Star Game devolving into what it did this past year. And none of that happened just like after one year. And so at some point, you have to stop the slide. You have to address it.”

Dumars and Evan Wasch, the league’s executive VP of basketball strategy and analytics, have been meeting with teams throughout the preseason to stress greater participation during the regular season, and a better effort given during the NBA All-Star Game — an apparent flash point for the league after last season, even though most of those games over the last decade have been relative duds.

Those two league officials are also working to promote buy-in from the players in the league’s first In-Season Tournament this season.

Both Dumars and Wasch said that among the league’s concerns was the impact load management and a generally lousy All-Star Game in February in Salt Lake City was having in the league’s ongoing negotiations with potential broadcast partners on a new TV contract worth billions of dollars.

The NBA’s current national TV deal with ESPN and Turner expires after the 2024-25 season and was worth $24 billion over nine years.

“All of this matters — the reaction to the fans, players, your TV (and) broadcast partners,” Dumars said.

Added Wasch: “We don’t need our TV partners to tell us that when teams sit players and when players don’t try at an All-Star game that makes for worse competition. It’s incredibly obvious to us, and ultimately we’re trying to serve fans. Yes, it’s the case that because we’re negotiating TV deals in the next year or two here, it takes on even greater importance because we’re in the middle of those conversations. But we can self identify that these were issues that needed addressing independent of any outside (influence).”

According to the NBA’s new resting policies, teams must ensure star players — defined as someone who has made an All-Star or All-NBA team in the past three seasons — are available for national television and In-Season Tournament games.


Teams must also maintain a balance between the number of one-game absences for a star player in road and home games, with a preference for such absences to occur at home. And multiple stars cannot be held out of the same game unless they are obviously injured.

There are a few loopholes, such as a player’s age or workload over his career (LeBron James will turn 39 in December in his 21st season, for instance), but teams found to be in violation of the new policies can be fined hundreds of thousands — and up to millions — of dollars.

“Where there’s a little bit of nuance is (that) a lot of players with injury histories may over some period of games need to sit one or more games to manage that injury,” Wasch said. “That’s the recommendation of either the player’s doctor, the team doctor, whoever the case is. And all we’re saying with the player participation policy is there’s a lot of cases where that can be done in a different way than it’s been done historically to promote better compliance with the policy and ultimately serve the fans better.

“And so if, for example, there’s clauses in the player participation policy about players with a certain age and workload or injury history who may have restrictions on back-to-backs, and historically those players, if they’re on the same team, may have all played the first night of a back-to-back and sat the second night of the back-to-back. So you’d have four starters sitting out the same game. What we’re saying now is (that) you can still get players those days off if they’re medically necessary, but not do it all on the same day. You can spread out that rest such that you’re not going to a game and seeing four starters sitting.”

The league has no real recourse with the players to force them to play harder during the annual February All-Star Game. Generally, the game’s level of intensity has dropped over the last several years, with the notable exception of the 2020 game in Chicago — played just after the death of Kobe Bryant, with new scoring rules implemented to foster a more competitive environment.

But as we saw in 2023 in Salt Lake, in a game that was close on the scoreboard (the final margin was three points) but featured exactly zero defense while 323 points were tallied between the two teams, the only thing that can really make for a better All-Star Game is if the stars try.

“It doesn’t have to look like a playoff game,” Dumars said, suggesting that the All-Stars in the locker room could aim for more dunks and dazzling passes in the first half, and then in the locker room decide to try and play defense in the second.

“When you turn on an NBA All-Star game, I think people expect to see some competition,” Dumars said. “There’s a happy medium somewhere between a heartfelt playoff game and what you saw last year. When you have stuff like that, and when you have the reaction that fans had and people had around the game, and just visually sitting there, it matters because it didn’t make the product look good. And so, you’re never in the business of putting your products out there and knowing it’s going to look bad and accepting that. Like, you would never do that in anything.”


Bob


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This is a little misleading. With every game, there is some chance a player will be injured, thus the more games played, the greater the overall chance of injury. This is just basic probability - if you buy more lottery tickets, you have a greater chance of winning (though still a ridiculously small chance). What they likely mean is that playing previous games doesn't increase the likelihood of getting injured in the next (or future) games. Even that I find hard to believe. The data shows that performance is worse on the second night of back-to-back games. The performance is likely worse because muscles are worn out from the previous night and have not recovered, thus effecting the players ability to execute optimally. It seems pretty likely that such muscle fatigue might also affect the ability of a player to adjust his body to minimize harm if he falls in a certain way.

There are a lot of half-assed studies out there. You'd think the NBA would hire folks to do a well crafted study, but look at the Wells report in the NFL; a decent high school physics student could tell you that report was so fundamentally flawed that it's conclusions were meaningless.