It’s a practice that was once controversial and even resulted in a fine for Spurs coach Gregg Popovich a few years back when he sat Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, and Manu Ginobili against the Big 3 era Miami Heat during a highly-anticipated regular-season game. “Resting” players who aren’t injured, however, has become increasingly commonplace over the years, and the rationale behind the practice is that coaches want to keep their star players fresh for the postseason.
It’s a line of logic that many have taken for granted, but in a piece written for The Vertical, longtime NBA trainer Tim Grover isn’t sure that the reasoning behind it is so sound after all:
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.
Grover hits a few other talking points that have been covered ad nauseam, namely the immense disappointment involved when fans pay their hard-earned money for a ticket only to find their favorite player sitting on the bench in street clothes, as fans in Washington did Sunday when the visiting Cavs decided to rest LeBron James.
Grover also talks about the mental toughness involved in playing through pain and fatigue and the fact that players don’t have the luxury of taking nights off during the playoffs. The wisdom of overexerting yourself physically is debatable, at best, but Grover goes on to propose a solution that might benefit all parties: having a player suit up for a game but only play a nominal amount of minutes.
Beyond that sort of compromise, it isn’t likely that the trend is going to reverse itself any time soon, especially with the tremendous amount of money franchises pay their star athletes these days. It’s financially irresponsible to run them into the ground, and in the case of the Spurs, the results speak for themselves. If you ask fans in San Antonio, most are probably happy to trade off a few regular-season games for the type of longevity and success they’ve enjoyed over the years.
