You bought the tickets months ago, paid a fortune to see the NBA’s elite play in your hometown. You loaded everyone into the car, dealt with the traffic, paid to park, arrived at the arena an hour early … only to find out your favorite superstar was taking the night off.
You’re wearing his jersey in the stands; he’s wearing a suit on the bench.
Many nights around the NBA, a big-name player misses a game. Not necessarily for a specific injury, but for “rest,” they say. “Just one game.”
It’s just one game until you miss the playoffs by just one game.
This is not really a new trend. The San Antonio Spurs have been resting players for a long time, particularly Tim Duncan, who was once listed on the roster as “DNP-Old.” Sitting the stars used to cause outrage and fines. Now it just gets a shrug. If Spurs coach Gregg Popovich – one of the most respected coaches in the league – can do it, so can everyone else.
Even superstar LeBron James rested Sunday as he watched his Cleveland Cavaliers teammates get routed by the Washington Wizards.
Having trained many of the NBA’s greatest – and hardest-working – players, I can’t buy into the “long season, save it for the playoffs” philosophy. If a guy needs rest, that’s fine; put him in the lineup and limit his minutes. He usually plays 30-plus minutes? Fine, tonight he’ll play 18.
Maybe change the rotation, and he can come off the bench. In the meantime, the rest of the team can pick up the slack and the subs get to play some crucial minutes and gain some real experience, so we can see how they play when it matters, not just in garbage time. Now everyone is happy: the star gets some rest, the subs get to play, and the fans don’t feel cheated.
Michael Jordan used to say he loved game days because it meant there was no practice (and if you ever saw how intensely he practiced, you’d understand why). As the season progresses, teams don’t practice as much. That is especially true for the stars who play heavy minutes every night. The focus shifts to more playing time and less practice time.
There’s a difference between taking time off, and taking time off to get quality rest. The main purpose of resting is to reduce fatigue, which in turn decreases the chance of injury. It’s not just about sitting on a bench for a couple hours. If you’re using your off-days to run around doing other business, making appearances, being a celebrity, you’re not resting.
A game on the bench followed by a night of hitting the clubs and two hours sleep is not rest. Lying on the couch, playing Xbox and texting your friends all night is not rest.
Rest means sleep. Foam rolling, hot tubs, cold tubs, stretching, massage … it all helps, but it’s not a replacement for sleep. Rest means shutting down everything so your body and mind can recover and re-energize. Without that, taking a game off is essentially pointless and unproductive.
For the young guys with less experience, if you don’t play when you feel diminished during the regular season, how can you test what you’re really capable of enduring when the pressure is on, particularly in the postseason? You can’t take a night off during the playoffs, when adrenalin and intensity are high and the opportunity for rest is low. The battle becomes mental, not physical: How deep can I dig down to push through the physical challenge? When the challenge is physical, the chip is on your shoulder, where anyone can knock it off. When the battle is mental, you carry the chip on the inside, where you’re the only one who can touch it. Relentlessness from the neck up makes you unstoppable from the neck down.
