Why were players so much more durable 15 years ago?

[Ice Man]

This is why it was much more taxing back then.

It was so much more taxing back then, yet the players suffer more injuries today? That math does not compute.

[nate33]

The game is much more demanding physically on defense now because of the spacing. Defenders have to cover a ton more ground, particularly if they don't have switchable centers. The weakside wings have to tag the roll man and sprint out to the corners. Guys have to rotate over and challenge the 3-ball when offenses swing it around the perimeter. There's also a lot more emphasis on transition offense, which means there must be much more emphasis on transition defense, including rushing out to the corners to stop transition 3's. It's not just that player are covering more miles, it's that they have to do so much faster.

incorrect. There was much better player movement and ball movement back then in the half-court so any perceived increase in running due to spacing now is almost entirely countered by that. They were banging down low amongst the trees back then too unlike today. And that took a lot out of players. This is why it was much more taxing back then. And I can't prove it but I feel like there were so many more fast breaks back then too since everyone knew how to pass and were taught to run and finish at the basket whereas now guys just run to their spots at the 3pt line so that reduces some of the strain as well.

Have you even watched a game from the 90's? It was mostly just low post isolations where they would clear one side out. Defenders had to stay with the man they were guarding, so they all watched two guys going one-on-one. Go watch a Houston game with Hakeem, or a Phoenix game with Barkley.

And the miles covered per 82 game graph going around on this thread proves it.

[Jamaaliver]

Kevin Garnett's thoughts.

Forgive the salty language, but his take is relevant to the thread.

Ultimately, he believes that the more frequent, more intense training endured in the 90s made players more physically capable to endure the long grind of a 82-game season.

Spoiler:

Read on Twitter

[Dominator83]

Players load manage more, saving themselves,

and it results in a longer career.

Look at this across sports - Messi, Mayweather, Pacman, Lebron all have ridiculous longevity.

Steph looks to potentially be similar. 40 is the new 35 when it comes to those guys.

Lebron always played though. in his 1st 15 years, he missed more than 8 games only twice

[iggymcfrack]

Improved 3-point shooting and the new more complicated defensive schemes required to combat it have greatly increased the distance that players need to cover defensively. At the same time, pace of play has increased. As a result, there’s much more lateral movement and change of direction in the modern game than ever before. The more often guys are making those sharp cuts, the more likely they are to develop a serious injury.

[CodeBreaker]

Because of social media

[HumbleRen]

More usage of quick twitch muscles in today’s era.

It was more physical back then but you weren’t violently moving north and south to contest shots or moving east to west violently to switch.

[sfernald]

I didn’t know this at the time when I was watching the games when I was a kid back in the 80s and 90s but players back then were on…..



But seriously, I think it’s the same thing that happened to horse racing. So many horses now are getting injured and having to be shot in races that the sport is dying.

The reason is all the pollutions and microplastics we are consuming and absorbing are making our own bodies more flawed such that when we stress them they are more subject to failure. Expect this just to get worse and worse until we clean up our environment. We are what we eat after all.

[DCasey91]

I didn’t know this at the time when I was watching the games when I was a kid back in the 80s and 90s but players back then were on…..



But seriously, I think it’s the same thing that happened to horse racing. So many horses now are getting injured and having to be shot in races that the sport is dying.

The reason is all the pollutions and microplastics we are consuming and absorbing are making our own bodies more flawed such that when we stress them they are more subject to failure. Expect this just to get worse and worse until we clean up our environment. We are what we eat after all.

Hit the nail on the head with micro plastics.
I know real serious guys in regards to food quality and water management. Even as little as ten years ago our foods have basically gone to the dodo. The nutrient factor is lowering year by year and there isn't much you can do about it (talking mass produce).

The food quality is still great where I come from but not the food itself generally. Water is still great because and that has alot to do with the Sun.

[vxmike]

Players eat too much processed foods nowadays. Makes them weaker and they don't get enough nutrients so their bodies break down.

players now have better diets than they did in the 2000s. thats an insane take

But did they eat well in their pre-NBA years or grow up on McDonalds? What one eats in the formative years is more important.

Derrick Rose was famous for living on candy early in his life/career. Despite being a supreme athlete with a strong-appearing build his body was apparently built from glass. I bet guys like Stockton and Malone didn’t grow up on candy and happy meals before they joined the NBA.

[vxmike]

The regular season is perceived to not matter as much today so guys and teams are much more comfortable sitting out games to heal minor injuries or just rest. Also there’s no pride in playing every game like the old days when Jordan or Stockton would play a random regular season game ill or banged up.

[FrodoBaggins]

Kevin Garnett's thoughts.

Forgive the salty language, but his take is relevant to the thread.

Ultimately, he believes that the more frequent, more intense training endured in the 90s made players more physically capable to endure the long grind of a 82-game season.

Spoiler:

Read on Twitter

Worth a read:

https://ballnine.com/2021/03/23/dont-stress-the-stress/

The rise of ailing arms
Why have people been so concerned about injuries recently? Well, the short answer is that pitcher injuries seem to be higher than ever before.

Injury data compiled by Jon Roegele shows a scary trend: the number of Tommy John surgeries, done to repair the ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) in the elbow, has skyrocketed over the last two decades.



Even though the 2020 season was shortened, arm injuries were still happening at an alarming rate. Analysis by Ben Lindbergh found that arm-related injuries through the first 10 days of the season tripled from 2019 to 2020.



It’s important to keep in mind that elbow injuries didn’t suddenly start happening in the 1980s. Before Tommy John surgery existed, an injury usually meant your career was over rather than having a second chance due to modern medicine. Part of the rise of Tommy John rates can be explained by the fact that the surgery is safer and more effective than ever.

Still, it’s unlikely that pitchers were ever getting hurt as often as they are now. What could be contributing to this massive rise in arm injuries?

MLB organizations, with more money invested in their pitchers than ever, naturally wanted to prevent those assets from getting hurt.

Teams began imposing restrictive throwing programs based around those given by doctors to rehabbing pitchers; they started out with a dozen or so throws from very short distances and slowly built in intensity over 6-8 weeks to around 100 throws from 120 feet. These programs were fine for their intended rehab purposes, but they were never meant to be the norm for healthy pitchers.

Still, as time went on, more and more organizations began implementing similar throwing programs for their whole rotations. Cones were placed on the ground at 120 feet. Throwing long distances or with high intensity was highly discouraged or even forbidden, and innings and pitch count limits soon followed.

The conventional thought became that throwing a lot was dangerous and that “your arm only has so many bullets — you don’t want to waste them”.

Legendary coach Tom House, who’s worked with Nolan Ryan, Randy Johnson, and Tom Brady, among countless others, was around before this level of control.

“In the 60’s and 70’s, there wasn’t a throwing program — the closest thing to it was long toss,” said House. “The more you threw, the better your arm got.”

This seemed to be the consensus before teams started imposing more restrictions in the 90s and beyond. Alan Jaeger, long toss advocate and baseball thought leader, concurs with House.

“Throwing was purely an instinctive act — it was something you just did according to how your arm felt,” he said. “And not so ironically, the more I threw the better my arm felt.”

So what caused this to change? Why did organizations begin to think, after decades of pitchers throwing how they pleased, that more throwing would lead to more injuries?

In one word, they were afraid of “stress”. They feared that long toss and high-effort throwing in general would cause large amounts of stress on the arms of their throwers.

As Tom House and Alan Jaeger noted, pitchers have always known this instinctively. Preventing pitchers from doing these things doesn’t actually stop us from experiencing stress — we still get that during games. But it does prevent us from being able to adequately prepare ourselves.

“Arms were being “trained” in 2nd gear (120 feet), and then asked to perform in 5th gear in game situations,” said Jaeger. “It should be the other way around — arms should be trained in 7th gear, per se, to perform in 5th gear. This is the basis for training in any sport.”

This is where the concept of “workload” comes in. Throwing workload, in the simplest terms, is the average amount of stress put onto the arm over a certain period of time.

On any given day, your “one-day workload” is what you get if you add up the stress of every throw you made. High-effort throws are weighted more than low-effort throws; in other words, 10 hard throws puts more total stress on your arm than 20 throws at half the intensity.

If you take your average one-day workload over the course of a week, you get your “acute workload”. This number gives you a good idea of how much you’ve thrown recently.

If you take your average one-day workload over the course of a month or longer, you get your “chronic workload”. This number gives you a good idea of how much you’ve thrown over the medium- to long-term.

A higher chronic workload signals that the arm is more built up, and we can use that info to figure out how much we can throw on a given day without getting fatigued or injured.

Research by Dr. Tim Gabbett, originally into rugby players and later into cricket bowlers, found that athletes with higher chronic workloads can handle higher acute and one-day workloads without getting injured.

Increasing your chronic workload can be done incrementally by first increasing your acute workload. This means that you need to throw more (on average) over the last week than you did over the last month.

However, it’s crucial that your acute workload doesn’t get too much higher than your chronic workload. Further research by Dr. Gabbett found that if the acute to chronic workload ratio was too high, injury risk increased greatly.

Dr. Sameer Mehta led a study testing this concept with pitchers. He found that if your acute workload was more than 30% greater than your chronic workload, you were FIFTEEN TIMES more likely to get injured.

If the traditional mindset that injuries are caused by throwing too much was true, we would expect to see most pitcher injuries happen towards the end of the season.

Instead, a study of MLB injuries found that injury rates are the highest in the first month of the season and go down throughout the year. A similar conclusion was drawn by a Ben Lindbergh analysis. Yet another study found similar results in high school baseball and softball.

[daytripper]

When I read about pace I remember the showtime Lakers. There is no team in today's ball who plays as fast as they did. There are barely any fast breaks in today's game, and when there are, many of them do not make it to the other end of the court as they stop and shoot a three. Then, in most games, there is nobody fighting for the offensive rebound, it is very rare to see. Many of these offensive rebounds are long rebounds becuase of the 3-point shooting. So, yes, there aspects that increase the stress in players in today's game, but there other factors that make it easier on players.

[FrodoBaggins]

https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/50/5/273

The training—injury prevention paradox: should athletes be training smarter and harder?
Tim J Gabbett

There is dogma that higher training load causes higher injury rates. However, there is also evidence that training has a protective effect against injury. For example, team sport athletes who performed more than 18 weeks of training before sustaining their initial injuries were at reduced risk of sustaining a subsequent injury, while high chronic workloads have been shown to decrease the risk of injury. Second, across a wide range of sports, well-developed physical qualities are associated with a reduced risk of injury. Clearly, for athletes to develop the physical capacities required to provide a protective effect against injury, they must be prepared to train hard. Finally, there is also evidence that under-training may increase injury risk. Collectively, these results emphasise that reductions in workloads may not always be the best approach to protect against injury.

[Calvin Klein]

A big part of this is players and agents know that load management increases the number of years they can stay in the league, which obviously means more contracts long term and therefore more money for them overall.

[Ryoga Hibiki]

this doesn't even tell us the whole story, it's even worse. It's the continuous start/stop that stresses the players muscles and soft tissues to much, rather than the total mileage.

[Ryoga Hibiki]

The regular season is perceived to not matter as much today so guys and teams are much more comfortable sitting out games to heal minor injuries or just rest. Also there’s no pride in playing every game like the old days when Jordan or Stockton would play a random regular season game ill or banged up.

people don't remember how bad the RS was in the 90s. It's way more competitive now, there was really no defense for 3 quarters.
that's why teams like the Heat were doing so well in the RS, but not as well in the PO.

[JR Hawks]

LOL at all the excuses. Players and society in general were tougher back then.

[NO-KG-AI]

Players miss games for minor stuff more and take more time to come back from it. More precautions than ever. Careers are much longer and players bodies break down way later now. I do think practice is less intense, and conditioning is just overall better. Best practices with balancing rest and intensity are just better overall.

Players miss more games on average, but it’s for the greater good. Look how long we get to keep our legends now lol.

[AdamSSSlither]

plumbers cant jump