The NBA Season Returns and A Question on Resting Players
The recent Boxscore Geeks Podcast brings up an important analytics question
Brian and I returned to podcasting right before the start of the NBA Season. Given it’s the start of the season, all of our takes were hot, and as I’ve noted after a decade of doing this, likely to be wrong.
Check it out here, like, subscribe, all that jazz!
Something I hope to be doing in the future is every time I release a podcast episode, I release a post related to the episode. It’s a model from 2008 and fun enough to work! So, today’s podcast supplemental? Rest management in the NBA and why I’m questioning some of the NBA’s current takes.
Some Background
This offseason and early in this NBA season, a few interesting things happened.
The NBA released new rules for resting players and how that would impact award eligibility with the new CBA.
The NBA updated player rest rules about stars missing games and how teams cannot rest multiple stars without valid injury issues.
Next, Joe Dumars released research, or rather, the findings from research, that resting players isn’t a great idea if you’re worried about player health.
Two other interesting developments:
The NBA may be announcing an expansion of two teams this year.
Adam Silver says younger fans aren’t as interested in the game.
Now, all of this connects to a very simple theme. The NBA recognizes that star players are the driving product for the NBA. And when those players aren’t present, it hurts demand for the product. Also, with the explosion of sports betting, ensuring people betting on games have good information on who is playing is key. Top players getting rested randomly is a good way to tick off the casual fan hoping to see a player like LeBron James play well as a gambler counting on LeBron James to ensure the Lakers cover the spread.
Another fascinating thing, though, is that, for better or worse, players seem to be on board. Former players will bash younger players for resting and not rushing back from injury. Modern players will get upset they can’t play despite team concerns.
With that in mind, there’s a very obvious point. If the NBA and its media partners want players to play and not worry about load management, and players, current and past, want to play, then who is behind rest management in the NBA? And that is a perfect segway to talk a classical NBA tale!
More Moneyballing Spurs
One of my favorite anecdotes is that the San Antonio Spurs were the NBA equivalent of the Oakland Athletics. For those that forget, the Oakland Athletics were the subject of the 2006 book turned movie “Moneyball,” which detailed how “advanced stats” were being used to help a weaker financial baseball team compete. Due to a horrible contract, seriously, research the ABA merger deal and a bad market, the Spurs were an underdog salary-wise. Yet, for almost two decades, they competed and won, including titles. Much of this was wise drafting and finding undervalued players from other squads. But another funny thing was rest management. Shout out to Chris Chan (@chantech), who pointed out that Tim Duncan and the NBA Player Age Curve, which Dave Berri goes over in the book “Stumbling on Wins,” lined up almost perfectly. And the Spurs were the perfect team to have seen the value of resting players firsthand.
In the early 90s, two players entered the NBA and changed much for their franchises. In the 1989-90 season, David Robinson started playing for the San Antonio Spurs. In the 1991-92 season, Shaquille O’Neal started playing for the Orlando Magic. Both players would go on to have MVP seasons and were absolutely dominant.
Here’s a breakdown of David Robinson’s MVP seasons, namely, the years he placed in the top ten in MVP voting.
1989-90 - 24 years old, 37 minutes per game, 3002 minutes played
1990-91 - 25 years old, 38 minutes per game, 3095 minutes played
1991-92 - 26 years old, 38 minutes per game, 2564 minutes played
1992-93 - 27 years old, 39 minutes per game, 3211 minutes played
1993-94 - 28 years old, 40 minutes per game! 3241 minutes played!
1994-95 - 29 years old, 38 minutes per game, 3074 minutes played
1995-96 - 30 years old, 37 minutes per game, 3019 minutes played
1996-97 - 31 years old, played only six games, and missed the season with injuries
1997-98 - 32 years old, 34 minutes per game, 2457 minutes played
And here’s Shaq!
1992-93 - 20 years old, 38 minutes per game, 3071 minutes played
1993-94 - 21 years old, 40 minutes per game, 3224 minutes played
1994-95 - 22 years old, 37 minutes per game, 2923 minutes played
1995-95 - 23 years old, 36 minutes per game, 1946 minutes played
1996-97 - 24 years old, 38 minutes per game, 1941 minutes played
1997-98 - 25 years old, 36 minutes per game, 2175 minutes played
1998-99 - 26 years old, 35 minutes per game, 1705 minutes played
1999-00 - 27 years old, 40 minutes per game, 3163 minutes played
2000-01 - 28 years old, 40 minutes per game, 2924 minutes played
2001-02 - 29 years old, 36 minutes per game, 2422 minutes played
2002-03 - 30 years old, 38 minutes per game, 2535 minutes played
2003-04 - 31 years old, 37 minutes per game, 2464 minutes played
2004-05 - 32 years old, 34 minutes per game, 2492 minutes played
Something telling about both players is how many minutes per game they played. Both touched 40 minutes played in multiple seasons. Shaq, likely due to four more years of NBA play than David Robinson’s Navy time, was dinged up and missed many more games with injury. Regardless, it seems clear both Robinson and Shaq played lots of minutes when they could. Both played really well, but by age 32, their MVP days were behind them. And that brings up a funny comparison.
Tim Duncan was another amazing #1 pick acquired by the Spurs. He was a transcendent talent in the vein of Robinson and O’Neal. And here’s how his minutes looked.
1997-98 - 21 years old, 39 minutes per game, 3204 minutes played
1998-99 - 22 years old, 39 minutes per game, 1963 minutes played
1999-00 - 23 years old, 39 minutes per game, 2875 minutes played
2000-01 - 24 years old, 39 minutes per game, 3174 minutes played
2001-02 - 25 years old, 41 minutes per game, 3329 minutes played
2002-03 - 26 years old, 39 minutes per game, 3181 minutes played
2003-04 - 27 years old, 37 minutes per game, 2527 minutes played
2004-05 - 28 years old, 33 minutes per game, 2203 minutes played
2005-06 - 29 years old, 35 minutes per game, 2784 minutes played
2006-07 - 30 years old, 34 minutes per game, 2726 minutes played
2007-08 - 31 years old, 34 minutes per game, 2651 minutes played
2008-09 - 32 years old, 34 minutes per game, 2524 minutes played
2009-10 - 33 years old, 31 minutes per game, 2438 minutes played
2010-11 - 34 years old, 28 minutes per game, 2156 minutes played
2011-12 - 35 years old, 28 minutes per game, 1634 minutes played
2012-13 - 36 years old, 30 minutes per game, 2078 minutes played
2013-14 - 37 years old, 29 minutes per game, 2158 minutes played
2014-15 - 38 years old, 29 minutes per game, 2227 minutes played
2015-16 - 39 years old, 25 minutes per game, 1536 minutes played
Sorry for the extra data. You’ll notice Tim Duncan played till he was almost 40 and, indeed, was still getting MVP votes until he left the league. But the telling part is this. At age 28, arguably a player’s prime, Shaq and Robinson were played 40 minutes a game. Duncan? He saw his minutes drop to below 34 minutes a game, where they would stay for the rest of his career. When he entered his early 30s, he stayed below 30 minutes a game. The Spurs were notorious for resting Tim Duncan on back-to-backs and were once fined $250,000 for resting their stars on a nationally televised game.
But something was obvious. The Spurs had learned their lesson from Robinson. If you luck into a one-in-a-generation talent and you play the wheels off them in their prime? Well, their prime ends at 32. Keeping Tim Duncan healthy for the long run made sense and paid off.
And this is where something in the rest management becomes clear. The league, the media, and the players don’t want players playing fewer minutes. Who does? The teams. Because the teams are paying the salaries, and with the modern CBAs only increasing in value, players are turning into a quarter of a billion-dollar investments quickly! Does it make sense to risk hundreds of millions of dollars of future capital in a throwaway game in the middle of the season? Well, if you’re Adam Silver trying to convince media companies to invest billions, you have to convince them every game counts. And this comes to a very simple economics lesson. Whenever anyone gives you advice, it’s never a bad idea to see if they have to pay for that decision. Joe Dumars and the NBA easily say you don’t need to rest players. But what about the teams actually paying the bill? Well, they caught on to what the Spurs were doing and have copied the strategy. Of course, as the NBA makes more and more rules about this, we’ll see who capitulates. A funny note there: as NBA revenues and payrolls grow, the fines levied on teams become more trivial. The rules listed above cite $100,000 fines for resting players. And that’s said as players are signing contracts in excess of $50 million in a season. The math for that risk is pretty easy, in my opinion.
Until next time!
-Dre