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Resting Era Is Here to Stay, but NBA Needs to Remember That Winning Still Counts
- Updated: December 20, 2016
The smell of the Korean fried chicken wings wafted above all the other catered food options, and the steam drifted at the same slow speed from the shower area into the quiet locker room.
It was the losing team’s locker room, and the guys sitting in it cared deeply that they were the losing team.
Allow me to take you back to the feeling that night in Milwaukee, two weeks before last Christmas, when something came to an end that probably will never be recaptured in this Rest Era of the NBA.
It was a team having given more than anyone could have expected, both mentally and physically, in pursuit of a regular-season victory.
The Golden State Warriors didn’t win that night, losing the 25th game of their season after winning the first 24 to set a record in major professional sports. It came at the end of two weeks on the road, the second night of a back-to-back set after a double-overtime win in Boston, and it left Golden State one game short of becoming the first team ever to sweep a seven-game road trip.
However empty the Warriors felt then was not because of what they’d lost. It was because of all they’d given of themselves.
This is the danger in this Rest Era of the NBA. The value—and the very integrity—of a regular-season victory becomes undermined because it’s no longer smart to try your hardest to win every time.
For all of us who have respected the achievement of playing all 82 and admired every athlete willing to fight through pain or illness to get his job done if there’s no risk of worsening an injury, we have to accept, however reluctantly, that things are and will be different.
The players’ emphasis has shifted from maximizing themselves in the moment toward increasing their odds of enduring. There’s no doubt that longevity is available in ways it never was before.
The average player’s NBA career reached 8.02 years in 2015, according to a league source—the first time it has ever topped that eight-year mark. It was 4.78 years in 1990, and even though it has fluctuated with time, the average career length has increased every year since 2009.
We should and must move forward with new information and ideas. It’s not just the players or trainers wanting rest; the league office accepts it, too. There’s flat-out too much support for it from sports science to disagree.
Let us understand, though, what the current days are: middle stairs on our climb to a greater consciousness where preventable injuries are indeed prevented, and only random acts derail the best teams and the best players from doing what they do best.
In this transition period from the old to the new, the only goal is to use the new tools in a responsible way for a greater good. That means serving the individual players in the best ways—replacing group ladder drills at the end of practice with personal biometric data determining who should do what—while maintaining the integrity of the league.
And maintaining that integrity is what is of greatest concern in this era of sports science. The issue isn’t that LeBron James is sitting on occasion to save himself, nor is it that anyone else whose data shows he has reached injury vulnerability takes a seat.
The problem is in trying to ensure that teams are maneuvering …
