At the beginning of the NBA season you could tell that sports science was going to play a major part in whatever happened. The team that wins the Eastern conference will be the team that improves the most during the season, and the team that wins the Western conference will be the team that has the best players stay their healthiest.
Atlanta started this season slowly but the Hawks have been the winningest team since late-November. A few weeks before starting to win the Hawks doubled the size of the team’s strength and conditioning staff, bringing in Mike Morrison from IU Health Sports Performance in Indianapolis to work with Jeff Watkinson. Before Morrison the Hawks had adopted few of the technical or quantitative athlete performance measures that other NBA teams have benefited from.
Atlanta had done well with the players who knew how to take care of themselves. Millsap and Korver had spent time with Marcus Elliott at P3 in Santa Barbara. Other players like Carroll, Mack and Scott had come through fitness-aware college programs at Missouri, Butler and Virginia with top strength coaches. Last season the Hawks were derailed by the should injury to Horford and the failed rehabilitation by Williams, but this mostly injury-free season has provided ample time for players like Schroeder to develop, tutored by skills coach Kenny Atkinson.
Have we seen peak Hawks? Probably not. Atlanta has recently dropped games to Boston and Detroit, a sign that the Hawks were hitting the fatigue wall that affected many of the teams Atlanta was beating during December and January. Atlanta may depend too much on Korver and Horford to play large numbers of minutes against the best opponents but the Hawks record gives the team an opportunity to give some of those minutes to Jenkins and Muscala, and create still more quality lineup options as the season transitions from the mid-season grind to late-season playoffs preparation.
Western conference teams Golden State and Memphis have pushed to the top of the standings. The teams seem set to stay there as long as they can avoid serious injuries to their best players, Curry and Thompson for the Warriors, Conley and Gasol for the Grizzlies. Golden State has seen the non-Curry, non-Thompson lineups develop and has been getting and growing leads when the bench plays during the second and fourth quarters. Memphis has benefited from the aquisition of Green and the steady play of Lee, Udrih, Koufos and Randolph to lighten the all-game and crunchtime requirements on Conley and Gasol.
What you see with the best teams is that injury prevention and improvement are two sides of the same coin. Players, lineups and teams improve when players do not lose court time to injury.
You can also see that they were helped by their last-season situations, specifically that they played meaningful games throughout the season, first to get to the NBA playoffs and then in the playoffs. College teams, especially in football, can make enormous gains through the extra work they get with post-season competition. Non-competitive teams lose incentive to improve as they fall out of contention, and these teams are more likely to decline and not improve.
Let’s hope that teams like the Suns and Hornets in the Western conference, and like the Pistons, Pacers and Celtics in the Eastern conference decide it is valuable to play meaningful games late in the season, that it helps develop the players and the chemistry that give them the best chance to win championships down the road.
The Best Things I Read Last Week:
- A Nasty Fight is Brewing Over U.S. Soccer’s Bizarre Policy on Training Fees VICE Sports … The United States has avoided creating financial incentives for organizations’ youth player development, something that is out of step with the rest of the soccer-playing world. Player development is sports science, but it also economics.
- Common Biomarkers of Sleep Debt Found in Humans, Rats, Penn Study Finds Penn Medicine … Identifying biomarkers is a critical step toward developing chemical tests for sleep deficiency.
- Arjen Robben: ‘You can discuss anything with Pep. At 3am he’s happy to talk’ The Guardian … According to Robben there are only a handful of coaches capable of succeeding with the world’s best teams. What they have in common is that they help even the best players to improve.
- Sporting KC’s Besler, Vermes address fitness concerns raised by U.S. national team coach Kansas City Star … An endnote to the discussion of USMNT player fitness describes the conditioning plan for one of the fittest players on one of the fittest teams in MLS.
- Player development: Examining Stanford’s distinct system ESPN College Football, Pac-12 Blog … You can see the very nature of college football changing from programs that recruit talent to get good players to programs that develop talent to get better players.