Luka Doncic Discussion: Lean Mean Slovenian Extension Machine

load management may not reduce injury risk but it sure seems like these players particularly stars are playing a lot longer. I'm shocked Curry is still good: he's not at his peak but smaller guys who depend on quickness and had a bunch of injuries early in their career was not someone who I thought would be playing at an all star level

Could be better fitness, nutrition, but I suspect load management is part of it. Outside of Tom Brady not really seeing the same thing in football?

 

Most guys were pretty much cooked at 35 back in the day.

 

It's not a false binary, it's 2 ends of a possible range, intentionally stated as such, to demonstrate my preference of which end to lean towards. More realistically, the Lakers will end up somewhere between that range, both seed-wise and health-wise, with the Big 3 all playing but varying levels of health and minor injuries. I lean towards erring on the side of health and the 6 seed than rushing them back on the court and the 2 seed.

And yes, coming back too quickly can lead to further injuries and set off a chain that persists even until the playoffs. Look at AD coming back too quickly last season, or Luka coming back in and out in the first half of the season last year, with Dallas rushing him, and after-effects of that (complicated by psychological affects of the trade). That's just 2 recent examples, there are more from previous years about people coming back too early from injuries. This is a more extreme example, but the same principle, but look at Haliburton for near worst case examples of this principle.

And Luka's current injury, while not something disastrous, is also not nothing. Lower leg contusions can take weeks to heal fully. If it were the playoffs, could he tough it out through it? Probably. It could also cause him to run and play and move differently, favoring other muscles, and result in other injuries. That has happened to people too.

I don't think they're taking an entire week+ off just for load management, especially with LeBron already out, and now 4-5 other players too. If load management were really the reason, they would just rest him for a game or 2, but not announce he would be out for a week+. Do you disagree? You think he's 99% and being held out for a week+ solely for load management?

I don't want to get into the weeds too much on this, but reading the quotes on this, Silver is clearly being very weaselly with his words, to cast doubt on load management, for the reason of trying to get the star players to play more and not take off games. Just like he has been weaselly with Rozier and Beasley and the Clippers cap circumvention. And to be fair, all of that is part of his job. He's trying to deal with all of this, primarily from a business and revenue and image level. Which is fine, but that doesn't make me doubt that load management helps.

This actually makes the opposite argument to me. The more impactful playoff injuries, including increased Achilles and other severe injuries, seems to stem from the increased pace, speed, running, quick lateral movements, etc, of the modern game. This is happening whether load management exists or not - one interpretation of this seems to be yours, that this means load management doesn't matter. My interpretation is the opposite - that injuries are more likely to occur because of the modern game, they are increasing, and therefore teams are turning to load management to try to mitigate that. The fact that it doesn't work 100% doesn't mean it's not helping at least somewhat.

We can also see this when looking at the opposite example. When players over overtaxed and overused, they become more susceptible to injury. Think Kobe in 2013, Haliburton last year, etc. This being true makes it more likely that the opposite is also true - that reduced workloads minimize risk at least somewhat. Not entirely, but some.

The dominant teams that stay healthy win. The ones that do not do not. Again, look no further than last season. Indiana and New York upset "better" teams that had health issues, and Indiana was likely on its way to another upset and a championship if not for health reasons.

There are many examples of players who finish games they got injured in, and then they can't play the next game or more, due to after-effects, more info about the injury that wasn't known during the game, or other reasons.

I think you're right about teams and players, but the league still cares, which is why they examined the issue during multiple off seasons and implemented a 65 game minimum for individual awards, in an attempt to get stars to care. This hasn't been as effective as they would like, and they are likely to try further measures in the future. John Ireland today suggested that if players don't play in X # of games, it should affect future contracts, and that there should also be bonuses for playing 70 or 80 games. He is Lakers, not league, there are probably ideas like this floating around at league offices as well, but they will have to be bargained for, just like they had to bargain to get the 65 game minimum for awards.

 

gs has managed his minutes pretty religiously, imo. i wish we would have shown similar restraint with lebron here, but vogel, ham, and even jj have all decided he can never sit (or he has?).

part of it is curry being pretty obsessive about his conditioning, too, of course. but i believe lebron is at that level, we just squeeze basically 3mpg extra out of him, and i really wonder if that adds up.

i agree that the data on load management just isn't trustworthy. you can point to positive examples like steph and duncan and to negative examples like kawhi or embiid. overall, you need to know a lot more about the context of the decisions to load manage to understand the data, and there just aren't enough real data points after that.

i will say that the frequency of achilles tears seems like a real thing to me, though, and that's either load, style of play, or training. the league better figure that out, as it's basically deciding titles these days left and right.