Spurs coach Gregg Popovich is known for resting his “star” players during the season in hopes of saving their legs for the playoffs. Pop was even fined two years ago for resting four starters in a nationally televised game against Lebron James and the Heat by former NBA commissioner David Stern.
Stern’s replacement, Adam Silver, however doesn’t seem to be like his former boss, and thinks data maybe prove that Pop’s strategy works and analytics as a whole.
Speaking at the the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Silver discussed many issues in today’s current game, including the 82 game season, back-to backs, and player health.
“There’s been a lot of talk recently about back-to-backs in our league, or four games out of five nights,” Silver said. “There’s a sense in terms of how tired guys are, but we should be at a point where using better analytics in terms of creating the schedule, but when they’re playing back-to-back and they cross two-time zones, does that have a different impact?”
He would continue to say:
“You’d like to believe that as a league, that ultimately, that’s not how we want to compete, in terms of the health and welfare of our players that we all have an interest in ensuring the best players are on the floor. So there are additional areas where I’m going to be having discussions with our general managers and our owners, and where everybody’s going to be willing to take a long-term view and say it’s in the collective interest of the league to focus on the health and well-being of the players, and taking the best wisdom from all the teams and distributing that, which is exactly what we do now on the business side.”
The moderator of the panel then responded by saying that once all teams start embracing that sharing of data and begin to analyze it, Popovich won’t be able to sit four starters for a particular game anymore, because the information won’t support the decision to which Silver replied: “Maybe he’s right.”
