The NBA season is underway and already teams are missing key players because of injury. As sports science adoption continues to progress, teams that fail to manage the health and well-being of their players should not feel good about what they’re doing with regard to conditioning, overuse and recovery.
Teams’ health management task only gets more difficult with the ongoing schedule congestion of the NBA regular season, and by starting off with key injuries. Teams that failed to make it through pre-season intact could be looking at a season-long Carroll Death Spiral, a situation where injury rehabilitation overwhelms a team’s ability to do the ongoing maintenance and preventive care it needs to keep the other players injury free.
The San Antonio Spurs are getting credit for figuring out the regular season, winning games and, at the same time, keeping guys fresh for the post-season. What does it say about the NBA teams when they cannot figure out the pre-season? Every team has injuries, but the Hornets, Pacers and Knicks look especially dumb about not taking care of players.
And it is dumb. The incompetence lies with both the coach and the athlete performance staff. It’s a bad coach that fails to incorporate useful sports science information. And it’s a bad trainer, clinician, nutritionist or sports scientist if coaches lack respect for what they have to say.
How dumb is sports science across the NBA? The Toronto Raptors have an explanation for why the team lost the smallest number of player-games to injury last season. The insight: Player-tracking during practice and games showed the mismatch between player movements in practice (mostly forward) and in games (mostly lateral and backward). Grantland analyst Kirk Goldsberry makes the point in a Wired magazine article that teams are missing lots of these sorts of insights.
Take the statistical tsunami of SportVU in the NBA. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that 85 percent of the teams don’t know what to do with this data,” Goldsberry says. “The idea that this is going to revolutionize the NBA—well, I’m not sure that’s true unless teams awaken really quickly to things like machine learning and data visualization.”
One fact from the emergence of sports science is that teams now compete on fitness, in every game and in all sports. The pressure on coaches to win is, as a result, pressure applied to players to achieve and maintain fitness levels that put them at risk for overwork and fatigue-related injuries. Dumb teams risk players’ health by taking a trial-and-error approach to realizing good habits. Dumber teams fail to realize that their habits are bad to begin with.