The closest thing to a reliable pattern in the long NBA schedule is Thursday, the day of the week that most teams won’t play on. That is because the schedule is usually limited to just 2 (sometimes 3) games. The limited schedule helps bring a national audience and attention to the televised games on TNT.
Last night neither of the TNT Thursday games was competitive. The Rockets blew out the Spurs starting in the first quarter and, after a close first half, the Trail Blazers destroyed the Mavericks. It was, simply put, lousy basketball product on display.
As sports science picks up I worry that bad Thursday NBA basketball will be the trend. If Thursdays off is the one consistent feature of a brutal playing schedule, the day anchors the recovery routines for players who get heavy game minutes, the players who also happen to be the stars that the audience is most excited to watch. The Spurs held two of the team’s best players out of the Rockets game, Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobli.
Giving crucial players a set, week-in week-out recovery routine to follow on one day during the week is better than having a routine in place for zero days during the week. More routine would, almost certainly, help players and teams over the long season. An NBA team could stagger players’ daily heavy-, easy- and off-days so that it fits a consistent weekly Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed-Thu-Fri-Sat profile, and do it in a way that covers all of the teams games with players for every position and provides extended rest for players following their maximum exertion days.
The basketball team that buys into this program effectively does away with starting lineups and second units. Starters would be the players scheduled for heavy work load on that particular day of the week. The second unit would be players on their easy days. And those roles are set to change on a daily basis if a team were to implement heavy-, easy- and off-days on a 7-day normal week schedule. The end result is that players can work harder on hard work days and rest easier on rest days.
The 7-day cycle is the most simplified example of applying structured scheduling to NBA teams and players that face a game schedule that offers few patterns, except for the usually-off Thursdays. Teams could do more complex 14- or 21-day cycles, but with 15 players on the typical NBA roster, the information management to track each player’s condition gets daunting. But then, that’s also what with science experiments that succeed, they get more complex until the phenomena is completely understood.