These days, NBA teams want to keep their star players healthy to win important games in the long run. Players miss games because they “load manage,” or simply put, rest pretty much for any reason. The term load management didn’t exist until recently. In the past, players missed games because they had serious injuries or dealt with personal situations off the court, not because they were being cautious.
Chicago Bulls legend Michael Jordan predicted the current NBA injury climate in his book Driven from Within, published in 2005.
“You can hear about how somebody played, or read about the best way to achieve success, but people need to set examples. Until they see, they won’t do. It’s easy to talk about what Jerry West did, but it’s not easy to see what he did. Tomorrow’s kids are going to have to see someone playing hurt, see someone practicing the day after winning a championship.
We have to provide examples so they can relate to that ideal. Otherwise, they will get bad habits. If we lose that gap, then it starts to fade away, and 20 years from now, you will never see someone play sick or get out on the floor with a sore ankle.”
Jordan’s Durability
Jordan set the tone while he owned the Charlotte Hornets. “Our guys aren’t used to sitting on the second game of a back-to-back.… We’re not sitting guys just to sit,” former Hornets head coach Steve Clifford said in 2019. “For me, my background frankly, it all goes back to expectations. Being with Michael in Charlotte, Michael used to tell them every year, you’re paid to play 82 games.”
Jordan played all 82 games in nine of his 15 seasons in the NBA, and he didn’t miss a game from March 1995 to June 1998. He pushed through the pain on a regular basis, like in the ‘Flu Game’ in the 1997 NBA Finals in Utah. Jordan played Game 5 despite being sick.
Nowadays, NBA players aren’t as determined to make sure they compete every single night.
Jordan averaged 38.3 minutes per game in his career. He played all 82 games in eight of his 13 seasons with the Bulls. None of the numerous accomplishments in his legendary career would be possible if he didn’t have the conditioning and the determination to play through pain.
