NBA Reports Show Load Management Isn’t Fruitful

This week, the NBA provided its clubs with data from comprehensive research that found no connection between load management players and a lower risk of injury.

NBA Reports Show Load Management Isn’t Fruitful

This was the outcome of an independent study using data from ten years of the NBA, in which experts in sports medicine considered the regular season load that players usually bear, the schedule, and the number of games played.

For years, there was doubt among certain league officials as to whether players who consistently took time off, even when playing back-to-back games, posed any risk of catastrophic injury.

That seems to be confirmed by this study.

NBA clubs have long permitted their elite players who are not injured to take it easy during the regular season in an effort to preserve their health and postseason form. As of right now, the IQVIA Injury Surveillance & Analytics study claims there is no evidence to support this notion.

In any case, the research looked at the connections between three crucial elements:

  • frequency of game participation and injury
  • schedule density and injury
  • cumulative NBA participation and injury

“Results from these analyses do not suggest that missing games for rest or load management — or having longer breaks between game participation — reduces future in-season injury risk,” the research concluded.

“In addition, injury rates were not found to be higher during or immediately following periods of a dense schedule.”

The variation in the number of games that prominent players missed was highlighted in the 57-page study. The average number of games missed by players classified as stars every season increased significantly between the 1990s and the present. It was 10.6 games in the 1990s. In the 2020s, it’s 23.9 games.

Teams started to focus more on their performance and medical staff along the road, to the point where such departments had more influence over player engagement than management and coaching staff did.

Commissioner Adam Silver claimed that the increasingly common load management technique used by NBA players is taking advantage of fans.

Players who utilize this excuse to take a nap between back-to-back games include LeBron James, Anthony Davis, and Kawhi Leonard. This is disrespectful to the spectators who have paid good money for tickets.

Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, has been hinting at this for months. When the league’s board of governors adopted a more stringent player participation policy in September, Silver informed reporters that “the science is inconclusive” about player rest. At the In-Season Tournament in December, Silver said to reporters, “We have no solid data that that is effective” in preventing injuries.

The truth is that it’s hard to estimate the number of players who may have sustained injuries if they hadn’t slept between games. It’s also reasonable to wonder what role the league ought to have in choosing a team’s starting lineup.

 

 

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