[h1]The NBA's back-to-back problem[/h1][h3]Why the league's new All-Star break rest period will do more harm than good[/h3]
Certainly commissioner Adam Silver and the league office have their hands full right now, but there are other pressing NBA issues, such as the brutal schedule.
A total of 1,230 games will be played in just 170 days. This stuff is exhausting. To put it in perspective, a handful of the NBA's most precious stars such as
Kevin Durant and
Paul George ran more than 200 miles last season, according to SportVU player-tracking, which is the equivalent mileage of slamming eight marathons into a roughly six-month span. Throw in the fact that NBA marathons require leaping, falling and colliding with some of the planet's most massive human beings, and you begin to realize the physical and mental toll on these athletes.
When the NBA released its gargantuan 2014-15 schedule last month, it came with the heartening revelation that the league would institute a one-week All-Star break to allow players to rest and recover. Instead of getting a weekend off, teams will receive a minimum of eight days without games, sometimes longer.
That's the good news. The bad news is the NBA will be crunching the same number of games into a shorter amount of time. You probably didn't hear that part. The dirty little secret is that the league did not extend the schedule by the corresponding number of days, so it will cram all 82 games into a tighter space.
The longer All-Star break was supposed to be an olive branch to the players. Instead, it required the NBA to add more drowsy back-to-backs to the schedule. In addition, the NBA ended up adding more miles to the already excessive travel itinerary.
Such a move might seem comparatively benign, especially in light of the
Atlanta Hawks mess, but the health of the NBA depends on the health of its players. And when it comes to player health, adding more back-to-backs is the exact opposite of what a top sleep scientist recommended to Silver last season.
By failing to cut down on the number of back-to-backs, the NBA is continuing to put its players at unnecessary risk.
Sleepless in the NBA
Rewind to early March at Hynes Convention Center in Boston, where the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference took place. The conference's main event, which brought together the brains and brass of the sports industry from around the globe, featured author Malcolm Gladwell going toe-to-toe with Silver for an hourlong interview.
While hundreds of attendees filed into the grand ballroom in anticipation of this bout of intellectual heavyweights, Silver was backstage in the green room, meeting with a man known in NBA circles as "the sleep doctor." Silver sat with Dr. Charles Czeisler, the director of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School. Czeisler also consults with NBA teams about how to deal with the grueling 82-game schedule.
Czeisler was getting Silver up to speed on some harrowing details about the effects of sleep deprivation on athletes. With its numerous back-to-backs, the NBA is creating a dangerous situation in which its players might be showing up to games with the impairment of someone who is legally drunk. All from not getting enough z's.
This was just one of the many alarming scientific findings that the sleep doctor had divulged just an hour earlier when he gave his own Sloan talk to a roomful of attendees that included team executives and national media. Silver, who was prepping for Gladwell's interview, had not been present for Czeisler's stern recommendation to the league:
"Personally, I'm very much hoping that the new NBA commissioner eliminates back-to-back road games," Czeisler said during his talk moderated by ESPN's Kevin Arnovitz. "It's a disservice to the fans to have one of the teams so degraded because there's no way structurally that we can ensure the players get enough sleep if they're on a trip like that."
Czeisler reiterated those warnings to Silver in the green room. The physician brought up a recent study that found that going 24 hours without sleep has the same impairment effect of a 0.10 blood alcohol level, which is considered to be legally drunk. And it's not just all-nighters that can cause us to effectively become inebriated. The same deficiency was discovered in those who couldn't consistently find a good night's sleep.
"Even if you restrict yourself to four hours a night for a week by having these relentless games after games after games," Czeisler said recently in a phone interview, "that can build up the same level impairment of going 24 hours without sleep. Not to mention the fact that it also reduces the testosterone levels by an amount that's equivalent to 11 years of aging."
Yes, a 25-year-old Durant would have the testosterone levels of 36-year-old if he doesn't sleep a wink on a back-to-back. Testosterone is absolutely vital for high-performing athletes, as it helps ignite muscle fibers and sharpen decision-making ability. There's more: Studies show that lack of sleep can increase reaction times by as much as a half-second, a lag that can potentially cause harm in a lightning-fast sport.
Every step, every movement in the NBA has a beat. Miss that beat, and physical consequences can arise. A turned ankle. A bumped knee. A flying elbow. Every millisecond in reaction time matters. Sleep deprivation can rob players of it.
"The fact is that it increases their risk of injury, not to mention it degrades the product for the fans," Czeisler said. "I think there's an attitude that, 'Well, it's just a game, what could be at stake?' Well, the player could suffer a serious injury that could affect them for the rest of their career."
All told, a sleepless night is not just a performance-depleting drug, but also a workplace hazard.
Such findings might not sit well with a commissioner who oversees a 1,230-game schedule that requires dangerous sleeping habits. Back-to-backs take their toll both on the body and on the mind. Statistical research on actual NBA games bears that out. According to a recent study by Jeremias Engelmann, an ESPN contributor and developer of the real plus-minus metric, back-to-backs have a measurable impact on a team's ability to play up to its abilities.
The study looked at
13 seasons' worth of data and found that teams that play a back-to-back on the road perform 1.5 points per 100 possessions worse than if they had had a rest day in between. It might not seem like much, but a 1.5-point decrease is roughly the equivalent of playing the
Dallas Mavericks compared to the
Minnesota Timberwolves last season. Said another way, a day of rest equates to half the value of home-court advantage.
That's nothing to scoff at. With all the inconsistent travel, some players are taking measures to combat sleeplessness caused by overnight travel. One NBA veteran, who requested anonymity for this story, said his sleep deprivation became so disorienting that he obtained a prescription for sleeping pills to help cope with the disjointed sleep cycles. The player, who has played for multiple teams over his career, takes the sleeping pills after every game, a routine that started four years ago and continues to this day.
"It's very helpful," the player told ESPN.com. Though his sleep habits have improved, the travel still takes its toll.
"At least five times a season, I get to an elevator at the hotel and have no idea what floor I'm on or what room I'm in. I have to go to the front desk and ask them," the player said. "There's also been a few times when I wake up in a city and I have no idea what city or time zone I'm in."
When asked how many players he suspects are on sleep aids, he declined to put a number on it.
"Sleep," the player said, "is an issue for a lot of guys."
You snooze, you lose (money)
At the time of the Sloan conference, the league was in the latter half of the regular season that called for a whopping total of 560 back-to-backs. Each team had anywhere from 15 to 22 back-to-back sequences with more than 95 percent requiring overnight travel.
Because of the time it takes to get on a plane, get off the plane, drive to a hotel, check into a hotel, unpack and get acclimated to a new city, back-to-backs often lead to players getting only a few hours of sleep before they have to take the court. Some might not sleep at all. And some trips, of course, are worse than others.
Consider a back-to-back that took place during the two-day Sloan conference. The
New Orleans Pelicans played in Phoenix on Friday night Feb. 28 and lost by 12, then hopped on an overnight plane to Los Angeles to play the Clippers on Saturday. How'd the Pelicans do? Fittingly, hours after Silver met with Czeisler, the Pelicans lost by 32. Worst loss of the New Orleans season, second night of a back-to-back.
But this raises a question: Why didn't the Pelicans just get a full night's sleep in Phoenix and then fly to Los Angeles the next afternoon?
It turns out the NBA doesn't allow it. Under league rules, teams are required to travel overnight if they have a game in another city the following day. They cannot travel the day of the second game. Teams know to stay in line; violations of this rule can reportedly carry a
seven-figure fine. A league office spokesman would not specify a dollar amount, though team executives put the figure in the million-dollar range.
This is problematic for a league that wants the best product possible. You don't see this type of travel restrictions in other sports. Last year, in the middle of their playoff chase, Czeisler advised the Red Sox
to sleep in before taking a cross-country flight from Boston to San Francisco rather than fly overnight, which was the standard practice. The Red Sox, swayed by the scientific evidence, waited until 10 a.m. the next day to fly to San Francisco, and upon arrival in the Bay Area, the team went straight to the ballpark to play the Giants. As it turns out, the Red Sox won 7-0, with starter Jon Lester going 8 1/3 innings. The MLB office did not bat an eye at the Red Sox for traveling the day of the game.
It should be noted that, unlike baseball's, the NBA season takes place in the winter, for the most part. But even though the league has strict policies on travel, Czeisler's recommendations to Silver did not fall on deaf ears. Minutes after his meeting with Czeisler, Silver was asked by Gladwell whether the league would look into eliminating back-to-backs.
"I'm fascinated with it," Silver said in response. "I'm generally sleep-deprived -- maybe a little bit today as well -- and so I think to the extent that there's data that shows that we can improve performance by changing the schedule, I'm all ears."
Interestingly enough, Silver then cited a detail from Czeisler's report that the problem is not just the games on consecutive days, but the travel associated with it. Crossing time zones can have an exacerbating effect. Although there are no public studies in basketball yet, a
baseball study in Nature that Czeisler cited at Sloan showed that the home team could expect to score 1.24 more runs when the visitor just completed eastward travel (say, Los Angeles to New York). Add 0.62 more runs to the home team if the game was during the day.
This is important, quantifiable insight. A recent study on
sleep deprivation in rugby matches showed a similar takeaway: Sleep is critical for performance and recovery of athletes. Judging by the commissioner's enthusiasm during the Gladwell interview, Silver seemed motivated to take action.
After the conference, Silver assured Czeisler that he'd have one of his deputy staffers follow up and possibly design a better program. Indeed, the deputy reached out to Czeisler over the phone, and Czeisler made an online presentation later that month, hoping to make real headway into solving this problem.
That was in March. And then TMZ released the infamous Donald Sterling recording with V. Stiviano in April.
"That," Czeisler said," may have eclipsed the sleeping issue."
The NBA's rest revolution would have to wait.
Will the new NBA schedule work?
As you might expect, everything would be put on hold in order to resolve the Sterling fiasco. Instead of pulling back on back-to-backs like Czeisler advised, the league quietly added more for the 2014-15 season. Eighteen, in fact, will be crammed into the schedule for a total of 178 back-to-backs, up from 560 last season. Furthermore, there are six more four-in-fives than last season.
"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."
Indeed, time off in the middle of the season will make the players happy in the short-term and allow them to recharge the batteries. Silver has said that
LeBron James
Czeisler hoped that the league would lengthen both the All-Star break and add some days at the end of the regular season to compensate.
"I don't see them as mutually exclusive," Czeisler said of the extended All-Star break and fewer back-to-backs. "That break should not be taken at the expense of depriving yourself of sleep. It's like a person who says, 'I need to take a vacation' so they stay up for three days before to do all their work and then they come back and work for 36 hours straight trying to catch up on the 500 emails that they missed. The restorative value of the vacation is destroyed."
As if the condensed schedule weren't bad enough, the league has actually asked teams to travel more this season, not less.
According to research by Ed Kupfer, a
Houston Rockets statistician and basketball travel guru on
Twitter, total travel is up to 1,359,299 miles in 2014-15 from 1,327,730 miles in 2013-14, which marks a 2.3 percent increase. Kupfer's research tells us that the
Miami Heat will have the largest travel increase in the league, from 44,896 miles to 54,300 miles, a 21 percent uptick.
You thought plush charter planes nullify any travel complaints? Think again.
"The effect of air travel is immense on an athlete, especially in recovery from any sort of collision or bruising," says Michael Regan, head of sports science at Australian-based Catapult Sports. "Even though these guys are on private jets, it's the pressurization and lack of moisture in the air that causes decreased recovery of the athlete."
To be clear, the NBA has bigger fish to fry at the moment, which is unfortunate in more ways than one. Surely, the league would rather have the time to plug every hole, but that's unrealistic. No one enjoys seeing
Kobe Bryant,
Paul George and
Russell Westbrook looking on from the sideline.
However, Czeisler isn't the only one who is skeptical that the NBA's schedule tweaks will improve the game. Some team officials around the league worry that the longer break, at the expense of rest days in the season, will make the players out of shape and more susceptible to injury upon return.
Indeed, this was a trying first season for Silver, and he has certainly shown he is open to new ideas. This is just Year 1 of the Silver era and more changes might come down the road. This much is clear: The NBA's problem of sleep deprivation will not be solved overnight.
