Sitting out an NBA game for load management lowers the risk of injury like staying home from work lowers the chance of getting into a car accident. Sure, there’s less risk when home sitting on the couch, but when the rested driver gets back in the car, the outcome is no sure thing.
That’s load management resting, an island of reduced risk in a sea of uncertainty. Of course, the principle is nothing that wasn’t used by past generations of coaches or players to manage minutes and keep players fresh. It was just called something else and left up to the coach or trainer’s subjective assessment of their players.
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What’s relatively new is the technology that’s being used to attempt to measure and quantify a player’s workload, on and off the court.
Monitoring load by tracking distance and intensity during practices and games has become an important statistic for teams in the NBA, especially with today’s superstar-driven teams. Teams have massive amounts of money, and hope, invested into one or two stars. With the rest of the roster limited because of financial constraints, any injury could be devastating to postseason chances. That puts a lot of pressure on performance and training staffs to keep players healthy.
To get data, camera-tracking technology captures movement in each NBA arena, giving teams an objective measurement of speed and distance covered for each player. Practice workload requires the use of a second system, usually one that measures similar information with accelerometers embedded in a strap worn during practice.
That data, along with any other relevant information, is blended to give the performance staff an objective measure of workload. The premise of the number is that every player, at any point in the game or season, no matter their innate durability, has a maximum level of load they can handle. When pushed past that point, something — tendon, ligament, muscle, bone — will break down.
Load management is a lot more than a synonym for rest. When teams are resting players for load management, presumably it’s in response to a workload value or trend that indicates a threshold has been reached. In the NBA, with little opportunity to practice during the season, any adjustment in load really has to come from reducing game time, not practice.
But the question really should be: can load management actually prevent injury? Superficially, resting players seems like the smart move to make when trying to maximize the potential to make it through the season and postseason without injury.
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However, maintains Fergus Connolly, a sports science expert and author of “Game Changer: The Art of Sports Science,” using load to assess injury risk has challenges. “The first challenge is that it’s hard to accurately define load,” Connolly says. “Is it a number defined by the previous game, or is it the chronic level for a season?” Connolly adds that it’s impossible to assess load by one simple number, formula or metric.
The calculus of load is not only different for each player but also is a moving target that varies by time of season, age and even by opponent. Kawhi Leonard’s load tolerance today is surely different than it was five years ago, in ways that are difficult to understand. “It’s like painting by numbers when you don’t have all of the numbers,” says Connolly, who has served as a performance director in the NFL, “And trying to fill in those gaps with incomplete data.”
Says Tim DiFrancesco, former head strength and conditioning coach for the Lakers: “Even if we can come up with a number that measures on-the-court load or stress, we don’t know what might be contributing to load off the court — lifestyle stressors like travel, sleep or family problems.”
When looking at injuries, in any sport, there’s the idea that a range of injury exists, from “not preventable” at one end, to “preventable” at the other end. Some injuries — Aron Baynes falling on Stephen Curry’s hand, for instance – are difficult to foresee and impossible to prevent. Those injuries have little to do with load and a lot to do with luck.
Also problematic for those that want to make order out of injury chaos, there’s a complex link between fatigue and injury, one not as simple as less acute or chronic fatigue equals less strains and sprains.
A recent article found that minutes played in a single NBA game did not contribute to the risk of sustaining an ACL injury. In fact, as reported in the study, NBA athletes played fewer minutes before sustaining an ACL injury than their usual minutes per game. Also, NBA ACL injuries were no more likely to occur in the fourth quarter than the first. In fact, nearly a third of ACL injuries occurred in the first quarter.
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Similar research, examining injuries over the course of a season, found no difference in the number of ACL, groin, or hamstring injuries between the first and second half of the season. The time of game also doesn’t appear to influence the risk of injury, with no difference in injury between the first and fourth quarter, or any two quarters for that matter.
This research doesn’t prove that fatigue isn’t a factor in injury, simply that it’s not the only factor.
A study looking at injuries in Spanish professional basketball actually found that less load, measured as less distance covered, was significantly associated with injury during games — meaning that players who didn’t play as much got hurt more than the players who played every game.
That’s because load management doesn’t always mean do less, as ample evidence shows that the body needs to be systematically loaded to prepare for the intensity of an NBA season. Without that constructive stress, muscles, tendons and ligaments might not be ready to take the demands of running, jumping and cutting for 82 games. Players coming off the bench, thrust into a starting role, might actually be at greater risk of injury than starters, at least if they haven’t been regularly hitting high intensities in practice.
“For me, load management is more about what a player does to prep for the load of the season,” emphasizes DiFrancesco, “and sitting on the couch and resting might actually leave a player less prepared to handle load. Because of that, it’s likely, when a player sits out a game, he might have instead done a focused workout that day.”
Done that way, a player is swapping out the uncontrolled, unpredictable stress of a game for the controlled stress of an active recovery day.
Part of the art of sports performance is finding the sweet spot of playing time and load. Just enough to establish the protective effect of stress on the athlete, and to win, but short of the level at which mental and physical fatigue begins to hurt performance.
(Photo: Andrew D. Bernstein / NBAE via Getty Images)