It is hard to argue that Adam Silver’s tenure as commissioner of the NBA since February has been anything but flawless.
Since taking over for David Stern, Silver has shown a willingness to take on new ideas and approach longtime problems in the NBA with fresh ideas. He has been willing to listen to players and take bold steps to position the league for the future. He has dealt with the major crisis of the Donald Sterling controversy and was largely applauded for dropping the hammer on the former Clippers’ owner. Everyone is suspecting a similar measure with the current Hawks controversy.
It also appears that Silver has secured a $2 billion television rights deal for nearly the next decade, securing a solid financial future heading into the next round of collective bargaining.
No human is perfect though. And each success is going to be met with something they have to push to the side to deal with the big problems.
That appears to be what happened when the Sterling issue came up and Sterling was met with a crisis. He pushed aside a quietly important issue — sleep.
NBA teams have really just begun to understand the effects of sleep on their players. Teams have poured some resources into studying how their players sleep and encouraging naps before games to try to help their players recoup.
Kevin Durant pulled out of consideration for Team USA, citing fatigue and exhaustion after long seasons, year after year. Photo by Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
The reality of an 82-game schedule is hard to avoid though. There are the back-to-backs and the constant travel — meaning late nights arriving at foreign hotels because the league requires teams arrive the day before the scheduled game.
You could imagine players are happy to see a weeklong All-Star Break, but that may not exactly solve the problem. The NBA has been at least interested in understanding the effect of sleep on basketball performance. If the players get rest, they will play at their best. And that will be good for the NBA.
Dr. Charles Czeisler presented at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference earlier this year study on the effects of sleep deprivation on athletes. For instance, he found that staying awake for 24 consecutive hours makes you as impaired as someone with a 0.10 blood alcohol content, above the legal limit in almost every state. Think about that for a second.
Dr. Czeisler got a meeting with Adam Silver, Tom Haberstroh of ESPN Insider reports, and Silver seemed open to the idea of changing the schedule to account for a lack of sleep. Silver has reportedly even been interested in exploring shortening the season. All this seemed like good news.
But, with the new schedule and the extended All-Star Break also came cramming in the same number of games in less time. The extended break does not help solve the sleep problem.
“Instead of making forward progress, we went backward,” Czeisler says. “The players, given the grueling schedule, benefit from several days of rest after the All-Star break, and I applaud the league for having made that change. But doing so at the expense of increasing the number of back-to-backs and the sequences of playing four out of five nights is an unfortunate consequence.”
There are more back-to-backs and more travel for teams this year than there were last year.
The data clearly shows there is an effect in back-to-backs — nearly 1.5 points per 100 possessions difference between the first and second night of the back to back. That is a big difference. The difference between being a playoff team and not almost literally.
Every team has to go through these stretches. It evens out competitively. But it is also not hard to imagine players would avoid injuries less if they are able to focus more and have their bodies in more peak physical condition.
Sleep is as important as weightlifting in maintaining that. These are finely tuned machines playing basketball and they are missing out on a key maintenance piece.
Other priorities obviously took up Silver’s time. But this is an issue he will have to turn back to.
Sleep scientists could be watching in earnest as the NBA embarks on a schedule heavy on back to backs and light on catching some z’s.
