The NBA would really like it if teams stopped practicing load management, and is now presenting some league-funded research to support their argument.
The league released an analytical report to teams this week that claims there is no correlation between the controversial practice of load management and its primary goal, decreased injury risk, according to ESPN’s Tim Bontemps.
The report is the NBA’s latest attempt to discourage the practice of sporadically sitting star players from entire games to reduce their workload. The use of load management has skyrocketed in the last decade, resulting in many games where fans don’t get to watch the stars they paid for.
The league instituted a policy last year allowing it to hit teams with fines, starting at $100,000 and escalating up to $1 million, for sitting players for nationally televised games. There is also a new rule requiring players to reach a 65-game threshold to be eligible for regular-season awards, including All-NBA honors.
The 57-page report distributed this week was reportedly produced by Dr. Christina Mack, epidemiologist and chief scientific officer at IQVIA Injury Surveillance & Analytics. In it, Mack says she intended to determine if there was any relationship between injuries and a player’s frequency of game participation, scheduled density and cumulative participation.
Mack’s report concluded there was no relationship, per ESPN:
“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 report said, in bold type, in its summary.
“In addition, injury rates were not found to be higher during or immediately following periods of a dense schedule.”
The report said that remained true even when factoring in things like player age, minutes played and injury history.
Supporting these findings were, reportedly, a 10-year sample between the 2013-14 and 2022-23 seasons with a group of 150 “starter-level” players. That title was apparently defined as any player named to an All-Star team in the previous three seasons, top-10 picks in that season’s NBA draft and the remaining players with the most total minutes played in the previous seasons.
It remains to be seen if this will change any current practices in the NBA. For starters, many teams will have already done research on this kind of stuff and could very well have reached a different conclusion.
Some teams and players might also object to how we define load management. Los Angeles Clippers star Kawhi Leonard has objected to his reputation as the NBA’s face of load management, pointing out many of his games missed come after significant injuries.
