20 years ago, the best players in the NBA, then Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson, Dirk Nowitzki o Tim Duncan, they played 79.2 games on average during the season. Last year, the stars of the league, now Giannis Antetokounmpo, Luka Doncic, LeBron James o Nikola Jokic, they played 64.4 games on average. What happened? In recent years, American basketball, tennis and cricket have experienced the revolution of rest, control of efforts, and so-called load management.
What happens if a footballer like Gavi At the age of 19, has he accumulated 141 games between the League, Champions League, Europa League, Copa del Rey, Spanish Super Cup, World Cup, Nations League, qualifications for the World Cup and Euro Cup and friendlies? That can end up breaking. “Gavi could play 16 games in a row,” proclaimed the coach Luis de la Fuente a few months ago, and I wasn’t right. But the fault was not his, it was football’s, its tradition, his culture.
«In recent years, football has incorporated professionals and technologies that measure the load of the players, today you can know if someone is at risk, but decision-making still depends on the coaches and their feelings. It is a social, historical issue; 10 years from now we will work in a more scientific way,” he says. Alejandro Romero Caballero, doctor in Sports Sciences from the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) and expert in so-called load management. «Nor can a direct relationship be established between fatigue and injuries, hence subjectivity continues to prevail. A footballer who accumulates many minutes has more chances of getting hurt, but we cannot say that he will pass 100% safely,” he points out, and the NBA is precisely in that debate.
Since the San Antonio Spurs Duncan, Parker y Ginobili If they made it fashionable, most franchises rest their stars in 25 or 30 of the 82 regular season games – not in the playoffs – and the controversy is getting bigger and bigger. “There is no evidence to show that resting players prevents injuries,” he said last month. Joe Dumars, executive vice president of the NBA, with the intention of ending those respites. If the best do not play, the fans disappear and, with them, the money: less for the franchise owners, for the television stations, for the sponsors… That is why this season the teams that rotate are fined and are allowed to play. without awards like the MVP for the stars who stay on the bench too much. The result? None, most are still resting.
With the support of coaches, more negotiating power with owners than footballers have and more attention to Big Data, NBA franchise players have understood that reducing the number of games played mitigates the danger of breaking down and there is nothing more ruinous for an athlete than an injury. Not even a few dollars or awards are worth it. A current All-Star earns between 48 million (Stephen Curry) and 10 million dollars (Anthony Edwards), so they have plenty of room.