NBA report: No link between load management, less injury risk
The NBA
disseminated an analytics report to teams and select media members this week
that said there is no correlation between players being load managed and having
a reduced risk of injury.
The report,
the latest step in what has been a long debate over the concept of load management,
comes in the wake of Joe Dumars, the NBA's executive vice president of
basketball operations, saying in October that there is no correlation between
the two. Commissioner Adam Silver backed up Dumars in a news conference last
month.
Dr. Christina
Mack, epidemiologist and and chief scientific officer at IQVIA Injury
Surveillance & Analytics, which produced the report, was careful to point
out that the report does not say that load management doesn't work, either.
"We're
not saying it's better or worse," Mack said.
The 57-page report was sent to NBA teams earlier this week -- at the behest of the NBA's competition committee -- to see if there was any relationship between:
• frequency of game participation and injury
• schedule density and injury
• cumulative NBA participation and injury
The report concluded that there was not.
"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.
The report
based its findings off a 10-year sample -- from the 2013-14 season through
2022-23 -- using leaguewide data and focusing on a group of 150
"starter-level players" each season. Those players were All-Stars
from the past three seasons, top 10 picks in that season's draft and the
remaining players with the most total minutes played in the prior season who
don't fit into either of the previous two groups
The report
also focused on players missing a single game, rather than multiple games in a
row, and was split into players sitting specifically for rest, as well as games
in which a player missed time for rest or injury.
Although the
report said there were a variety of factors that limited the scope of the
findings -- the inability to examine trends from outside the 10-year window of
data, and the different ways individual teams handle this topic -- it
repeatedly stressed that there was no correlation between load management and
ensuring players will be on the court more regularly.
While
single-game absences for starter-level players skyrocketed over the past decade
-- from a combined 169 among starter-level players in 2014-15 to 380 in 2022-23
-- the number of regular-season injuries among starter-level players also
reached a 10-season high this past season.
Early in the
report, it explained why it was commissioned this summer: the ongoing
discussion about star players missing games.
In the
1980s, star players -- a group defined by the report as players who were either
All-Star or All-NBA selections in the current season or the prior two -- missed
an average of 10.4 games per season, a number that was 10.6 games in the 1990s.
But that
number jumped from 13.9 games in the 2000s to 17.5 games in the 2010s and 23.9
games in this decade.
NBA senior
vice president of player matters Dave Weiss, asked if that dramatic increase in
missed games over the past 20 years could be attributed to load management,
said much of it was because of injury, but that single-game absences for
players had increased by about five times over that span.
"Clearly,
that's happening more than at just the rate of injuries," Weiss said.
The report's
findings -- establishing that load managing players does not definitively lead
to them being healthier -- was in line with what Dumars said back in October.
At last
month's in-season tournament, Silver reiterated the stance that there's no
data-driven proof that the concept of load management keeps players healthy. He
called the science and medical data "mixed."
"The
question is I think the ultimate question behind load management isn't so much
that there isn't a fall-off from performance when you are tired and
fatigued," he said. "The question is, does that lead to more
injuries?"
That was in
direct contrast to Silver's comments last February, when he said, "The
suggestion, I think, that these men, in the case in the NBA, somehow should
just be out there more for its own sake, I don't buy into."
Weiss said
that change in tone was a function of the league deciding it was necessary to
study the data.
"We
accepted that conventional wisdom and some of the information that teams had
shared with us over years, which included some data but never nearly as robust
as what we've now shared back," Weiss said. "And it hit a point where
we said, 'You know, we have been looking at this for years and we are not
seeing this effect, and so we think we need to get more formal and structured
in terms of how we're analyzing this and sharing it out with teams.' And that's
really kind of what led to this."