The concept of “Load Management” has become a major part of NBA discourse over the past couple of decades or so. Teams have hired sports scientists and medical professionals to study the relationship between rest and performance. Smaug-like behind the locked doors of their analytics offices, they’re hoarding proprietary data about what works and what doesn’t.
Let me preface most of what I’m going to say here by letting you know that I’m cool with the whole load management movement. I think it’s good for players to rest up, feel healthy, etc. I want players to be at their best when they play, and I think it’s reasonable to assume, to some degree, that rest, in general, is probably a good thing.
Nevertheless, I find myself feeling incredibly frustrated with the discourse around this stuff. Your average NBA broadcast spends a lot of time bemoaning the supposed softness of today’s players. There’s a common refrain of it didn’t used to be this way, and the discourse returns to it over and over again about rest, about how many 3s teams are shooting, etc.
I’m allergic to that shit. Please, FFS, miss me with your nostalgia for the good old days. I remember the good old days: when, for just one example, the NBA had to make the “Mark Jackson Rule” to prevent shit like this from happening a million times every game.
So, when I hear announcers and media types complaining about load management in their holier than thou kind of virtue signaling tone, I cringe. But I really, really cringe at the idea of discussing the entire concept of rest like it’s a clear, settled thing. To listen to these people, you’d think that playing basketball is terrible — that the main priority of a coach should be to play his good players as few minutes as possible.
First of all, are NBA players even playing fewer minutes per game than they used to? Well, it depends what you mean by “used to.”
I decided to look at the average minutes per game (mpg) among the top 100 players in that statistic. For example, thus far this season, the top 100 players in mpg are averaging 32.78 (Donovan Mitchell leads the league at 38.2 as of 11/23 at 10:51 in the morning here in Easthampton, Massachusetts).
Last year, at this point in the season, the top 100 players were averaging 33.0 mpg — pretty damn close to this season’s number. By the end of the season that number had fallen to 32.0, and that kind of decline seems to hold true in most seasons.
If we just stick with end of the season numbers as an historical measure, it’s interesting. Last season, as I said, was 32.0. The prior season? 31.9. I decided, for ha-ha’s, to look up a couple of random seasons from the past. 1985-86? 32.0. 1997-98? 34.6 2009-10? 34.7
So, what I would say is this, how many minutes players play is currently lower than it was a decade and two decades ago, but it’s exactly where it was three decades ago. Make of that what you will.
Other questions worth considering:
What, exactly, is the correlation between minutes per game and injuries? Is it just that more time on the floor is more opportunity for a player to get injured, or is there an increased impact from wear-and-tear as a player’s minutes in a given game or over the course of a season increase?
What is the difference in terms of injury risk between a player who plays 38 mpg and a player who plays 35 mpg? 35 and 32? 32 and 29?
Might there be a benefit in terms of injury risk to playing a consistent amount of minutes in each game?
What is the correlation between minutes per game and post-season performance? What about performance in later rounds of the playoffs as opposed to earlier rounds? If there’s a decline in performance, how do we determine how much of that decline is due to stiffer competition and repeated matchups (as opposed to wear-and-tear)?
What is the correlation between minutes per game and career length?
How do we account for the rhythms of the season? Might it be beneficial to play more minutes early in the season and then back off as the season progresses? Might the opposite be true?
All things being equal, is it better — in terms of postseason and long-term performance as well as injury risk — to play fewer games or to play fewer minutes per game?
How do factors like athleticism, height, weight, position, etc. factor in to all of the above questions?
How does style and mood factor in? Are, say, Jayson Tatum’s minutes different than Jaylen Brown’s minutes? Are first quarter minutes the same as fourth quarter minutes? Are minutes when a team is trailing different than minutes when a team is leading? Are clutch minutes different than minutes played during garbage time?
There are many other questions one could ask. And, frankly, if one is going to pontificate about whether a coach is playing his players too many minutes, one probably should ask them.
Here’s the thing: basketball players need to play. Basketball players aren’t relief pitchers in baseball. You can’t have Nikola Jokić just sit on the bench for the first 42 minutes of the game and then pop in for the final six if and only if you need him.
Of course you can pull players out of the game when it’s already been decided, but how do you determine when that is, exactly? Is there historical evidence in the data that this helps? And how do you weigh that need against other concerns, like finding minutes for certain lineups against certain defenses, for example?
I would just hope those of us who get a lot of joy out of NBA discourse might take a step back and be a little more curious. If you feel like you’ve got a settled interpretation of what a coach should do in a given situation, and the coach isn’t doing that thing, that doesn’t mean the coach is suffering from a “blind spot.” It might just mean they’ve thought of something you haven’t thought of yet. We all have blind spots, by the way. We can’t see them, which is why we call them that.