A couple days ago I was listening to ESPN Senior Writer Zach Lowe's podcast, "The Lowe Post"( the best NBA podcast name around). He had the always insufferable - yet engaging - NBA color commentator Jeff Van Gundy on as a guest. I clicked on the podcast solely because I knew Jeff was going to have some dissenting opinions no matter what was said. He sure didn't disappoint! One of the things he went into was how he's so disgusted with how much rest players get in the regular season to prepare for the playoffs, and when they perform badly that "lack of rest" is used as an excuse by analysts in the media to disregard their ineffective play. You can hear Van Gundy's rant in the segment below. It goes on for about 4 minutes.

The exchange begins when Zach Lowe incites that James Harden and Chris Paul should just rest and take it easy this year during the regular season, that way they'll be more energized for the grind of the playoffs. Not a controversial opinion in this day and age. We first saw Greg Popavich roll out this approach with his older Spurs stars in the early 2010's, and we've seen LeBron adopt this mindset whether it comes to sitting out games, or just minimizing the amount of exertion he puts out on both ends of the floor in regular season games. Pretty much any major star will get as much rest as they want/need in the leadup to the postseason, whether it's their coaches suggestion or their own.

In response, Van Gundy rises up to the hypothetical rim and swats the shit out of Zach Lowe's assertion of rest. He remarks,

I don't buy that "gassed" thing....that's a myth....Did you ever say that about Jordan? "Dial it back"? What is this now? Like, you can't try in the regular season and be ready in the playoffs when you have so many more days of rest? I mean the Rockets don't shoot around and don't practice very much. It's possible, if you're Mike D'Antoni, to pace your team on off days like he has. They have plenty of rest. So you don't want them to practice shoot around, or play? I don't understand. Then what are we paying these guys for?...
...Every time there's a problem now, we wait to see what happens and then we say "Oh, they tried too hard in the regular season...."He tried too hard in January, so in late May, he was unable to perform well"...From what I've read, there's no science that has ever proven these things. So what Houston was doing, they were covering for Harden. He played awful. He looked disinterested in Game 6...All this excuse making, "He was too tired" - no, sometimes teams play bad. Sometimes individual players play bad. Sometimes coaches coach bad. And sometimes, you just go up against a better opponent."

The game Van Gundy referenced was Game 6 Houston vs. San Antonio in the 2017 Western Conference Semi-Finals. The Spurs defeated Rockets from top to bottom, 114-75, and James Harden only had 10 points. To me, Van Gundy seems right on the money about Harden in this game. The man just had an awful performance when his team had their back against the wall in an elimination game. I initially didn't give much thought to how we view a player resting midseason to gear up for the playoffs, but Jeff Van Gundy did raise some intriguing points about how we distribute credit when a team or player doesn't get adequate rest. The main storyline after that game revolved around Harden's shortcomings, when an overlooked factor was that San Antonio just played lights out.

Zach Lowe seemed to agree with Van Gundy that sometimes you just get outplayed, but he countered with the idea that the pace of the game (especially defensively) requires so much more running around. He isn't wrong about that. Much of today's action revolves around switching and chasing lightning-quick guards and forwards around the length of the perimeter while fighting through screens. The 80's and Jordan's NBA had a greater emphasis on post play, where you aren't necessarily covering as much ground, but the greater physicality of the interior would've brought on fatigue and injuries as well. I think Lowe raises a valid point, but how much science is out there to back up the claims of these men?

Source: SB Nation

An interesting study in the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine found that resting players throughout the year didn't crucially affect a player's performance in the playoffs, nor prevented injuries when playoff time came around. They created two groups of players: those who rested fewer than 5 games in a season and those who rested from 5 to 9. They compared players who had similar roles, workloads and results such as position, points per game, minutes, Player Efficiency Rating, and team success (in an effort to avoid comparing a superstar with a role player). At the end of the day, their results showed that players who rested less during the regular season had virtually the same playoff statistics as those that rested more, and they didn't miss a significantly greater amount of games due to injury in comparison to the rested ones.

My problems with the study were that they didn't take into account when a player rested, and they didn't really quantify the player's output on defense as greatly as offense (i.e. Player Efficiency Rating doesn't weight defense as much as offense). Still, it's possible that the players who got extra rest did receive it in the middle of the year, we just don't have a dedicated study to players resting during a specific time of the season. You can dive into that study here.

So it isn't crystal clear that resting players mid-season will help them directly perform better in May or June. We can however point to instances where resting players has led to immediate short-term benefits, which can presumably lead to greater confidence and therefore improved team morale. An example of this is when Warriors head coach Steve Kerr decided to rest Kevin Durant, Steph Curry, and the rest of his starters against the Spurs in a national TV game in March of 2017. The Warriors just lost 4 of their last 6 games before deciding to rest Durant and the starters, and they even lost that game against the Spurs. But right after that, they ripped off a 14 game winning streak, and they took that momentum into the Finals where they won an NBA Championship. Given, that team's roster is unfair as hell, but that was the same personnel that was in the middle of a losing pattern before rattling off their string of wins.

Source: SB Nation

One lifestyle change related to rest that has caused players to make on-court strides is a greater emphasis on catching Z's. When Andre Iguodala came to the Warriors, he got in touch with a renowned physician named Cheri Mah from UC San Francisco who works with the team. She made him change his sleeping habits up. Iguodala would traditionally not prioritize his sleep dating back to his college days at Arizona. When he started to take his sleeping routine more seriously, he doubled his three-point percentage, which led to an increase in minutes and slightly lowered his foul and turnover rate per this article from Wired. He began changing his habits in 2013, leading to the culmination of his individual success in the 2015 NBA Finals where he won Finals MVP and had the energy to defend LeBron James admirably every night while averaging 16 points, almost 6 rebounds and 4 assists. LeBron himself knows the power of sleep before big moments, as he remarked to reporters that sleep is "the best possible recovery you can get" in preparation of Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals.

Sometimes the dividends that rest can pay are psychological, not physical. I remember one instance where LeBron sat out for a couple weeks nursing left knee and back pains during his first year back in Cleveland, 2014-15. Many people speculated that he sat out longer than he needed to because the man just needed a couple weeks of rest and recuperation. He just done with his incredibly physically, mentally, emotionally draining years with the Miami Heat, which included playing the entire length of a full season plus every game into the playoffs and the NBA Finals. LeBron had been going nonstop for four straight years. He may have just needed to take a step back to decompress for a couple seconds. After LeBron got that much-needed rest, the Cavs went on a tear and rallied to the NBA Finals. Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love weren't healthy for it though. If they had been, the Warriors would've had a bigger problem on their hands.

Commissioner Adam Silver knows that resting in the NBA is a huge issue, that's why he made measures to spread out the schedule. They lengthened the NBA schedule by one week and cut down the number of back-to-backs, and also took out the "four games in five days" parts of the schedule. The idea was to give players more recovery time, and coaches less of a reason to sit players for the sake of resting. The rest will still persist if the stars want it though. The NBA is particularly star-driven because one or two players can greatly affect how much a team wins, and the way they formulate their game plan.

I'm all in favor of the NBA making changes to the schedule to give the players more rest, but that still won't stop coaches like Greg Popovich and Steve Kerr from resting their stars when they want to. Part of it has to do with maintaining the precious player-coach relationship, but that Van Gundy rant did make me wistful of the night-in-night-out, every-game, every-possession warrior mentalities of players like Kobe and Michael Jordan. That's why I respect the hustle of Russell Westbrook, who plays like an all-out savage especially in big games. Jimmy Butler seems to have that trait too, but he doesn't have the results to go with it. I just know that when I see players putting all of their effort into every possession and every game, I'm going to respect them even more than I already do.