NBA

How Kawhi Leonard Turned Load Management Into a Style of Play

The Clippers star has been at the center of the NBA’s conversation surrounding rest and health this season. But Leonard is doing more than just sitting out on back-to-backs—he’s finding ways to maximize his output on the floor, too. 

NBA

How Kawhi Leonard Turned Load Management Into a Style of Play

The Clippers star has been at the center of the NBA’s conversation surrounding rest and health this season. But Leonard is doing more than just sitting out on back-to-backs—he’s finding ways to maximize his output on the floor, too. 

By Paolo UggettiDec. 24, 2019, 11:30 am UTC • 15 min

By the time Kawhi Leonard exits the Staples Center locker room at 11:26 p.m. on Halloween night, you’d hardly know that a Clippers game took place there just a few hours before. The other players and coaches are long gone. The giant sign that covers the Lakers’ 16 championship banners during Clippers games has been taken down. Carpets with Clippers insignia have been rolled up, and the faint sound of a forklift beep echoes in the otherwise silent arena. 

Three ushers keep watch over the locker room and press conference room where Leonard will speak to the media, and two other employees sit on a cart that is meant to haul the chairs and signs out of the room once he’s done. “Estamos esperando al jugador,” said the cart driver, who has worked at Staples Center since the arena was built. We are waiting for the player. 

Another worker walked by and laughed. “Imagine how good you have to be to make all these people wait,” he said. 

On this particular night, there was no debating whether Kawhi was worth the wait. Leonard scored 38 points in 34 minutes and led L.A. to a 103-97 win over his former team, the Spurs. It’s still early in the season, but it’s the most minutes he’s played in a game so far; afterward, he went through a roughly hourlong recovery routine before speaking to the media. When asked in his press conference what the regimen looks like, Leonard gives a vague itinerary in a hushed tone: “Some rehab stuff, some lifting, and a light massage,” he says. “Get some kinks worked out, seeing what’s right, what’s sore, making sure I leave in a proper way rather than leave with something hurting.” 

One of the few things we know about the enigmatic Leonard is that his health is of paramount importance to him. That became clear two years ago, when he reportedly disagreed with the Spurs’ doctors about whether he was healthy enough to play due to a recurring right quadriceps injury. (That issue, diagnosed by the Spurs as tendinopathy, and the way it was handled eventually led Leonard to request a trade.) Leonard continued to carefully manage his health after his trade to Toronto; there, he conducted a rudimentary version of the postgame routine he practices today, and he played in just 60 regular-season games before leading the Raptors to the title. Now, “load management” is getting nearly as much attention as his play—in early November, the NBA released information about a left knee injury to justify his sitting out.

“He always [said] what he cared about was playing, staying healthy, and winning,” Raptors coach Nick Nurse said before Toronto faced Kawhi in another game on November 11. “And playing for a long time.” 

But for Leonard, load management isn’t just about sitting out games. Over the past few years, and especially this season, Kawhi has developed a balanced approach on the floor that allows him to do more while doing less. As a result, watching him involves a certain level of mystery—the moves (the midrange, fadeaway jumpers, elite one-on-one defense) are the same, but the fun lies in how and when he deploys them. Leonard has become one of the best players in the league, but he doesn’t get there without his economical approach to managing his body—when he sits and when he plays.

Load management as a concept isn’t new to the NBA, even if the terminology might be. Gary Vitti saw the process of managing players’ fatigue evolve during the 32 years he spent with the Lakers as a trainer. When he first started in Los Angeles, Vitti had to use his own eyes and intuition to tell when a player was slipping into what he calls “postural distortion”—when a player’s movements are noticeably less sharp, raising the possibility of injury.

Once cameras began tracking players’ average speed and distance traveled during a game in the 2013-14 season, though, Vitti was able to put a number on a player’s “load” and their “intensity.” Vitti said he took the average speed of a player and multiplied it by the average distance and then by the player’s weight to get their load. Divide that number by how many minutes the player played and you get their intensity. The relationship between the two numbers helped determine whether a player could be pushed or needed to be limited, in practices or games.

“What we were looking for was a direct linear relationship between load and intensity,” Vitti says. “If the load is going up, we want intensity to go up with it. If it did, then you were in a green zone and we could push you.” 

The management portion comes in once a player’s intensity level flattens. When that happens, Vitti says a player enters a “yellow zone,” meaning if their load is not decreased, it can lead to a danger zone where injury risk is high.

Even though the term is often based on quantitative facts, “load management” has become a polarizing phrase that has placed fans at odds with teams when they rest star players; teams at odds with the league; and most recently, Doc Rivers at odds with LeBron James. What Gregg Popovich helped pioneer with the Spurs when Kawhi was there has since been furthered by Leonard with the Raptors and Clippers medical staffs. (Both staffs declined comment for this piece.)

“My health is no. 1 and that’s gonna make us a better team,” Kawhi said after that Halloween game against the Spurs. That Kawhi has realized its importance is half of the work. As Vitti points out, player buy-in is integral to the process—try telling Kobe Bryant you’re taking him out because of load management. 

“In the old days, there was a concept of breaking through the wall. When you were fatigued, that’s when you had to break through the wall,” Vitti says. “But now, when that person reaches that point of fatigue [that could injure them], that’s when you want to stop the load, begin the recovery process so that you can come back another day. We’re not breaking through the wall. We’re moving the wall.” 

This season, Kawhi has yet to play in back-to-back games, and it seems unlikely that he will. He has played 37 minutes or more just three times this season; he did that 13 times in the 2018-19 regular season. But he knows that number will shoot up in the postseason—he averaged a career-high 39 minutes per game in the playoffs with Toronto, and for the Clippers to make a deep run, he’ll likely need to do the same in L.A. That’s why he takes his postgame recovery routine so seriously. NBA trainers and sports scientists put an emphasis on how crucial postgame recovery is, especially in the context of maintaining strength during a long season. Ezequiel Rey, a sports scientist at the Universidad de Vigo in Spain, says it even makes sense, for recovery purposes, that Kawhi would lift weights after games. 

“There are a number of studies that have suggested that one form of recovery for the muscles is to train the strength of those muscles,” Rey says. “Strength training after a competition or training [eliminates] the creatine kinase, CK for short—which is typically a bad thing for an athlete—faster. That CK slows down recovery. So if you’re able to eliminate it quicker or more efficiently, you’re able to recover faster.” 

But Kawhi’s load management goes beyond fine-tuning his body. Said Rivers: “Everything that he does is about health, recovery, and getting an edge.”

Have you ever seen Lionel Messi go from zero to 100 in half a second? One of the best players in sports history makes soccer look less like a grueling marathon and more like a game of quick-twitch spurts. Messi roams the midfield at a relatively casual pace until, in the blink of an eye, he revs up and goes. Whether he streaks toward an opening for a pass or catches the defense off guard with the ball tethered to his feet, his flashes of genius are like lightning: blink and you’ll miss it. 

Leonard plays in a similar fashion. There aren’t enough people on a court to allow a basketball player to blend in the way a soccer player does, but Kawhi is so calculated in his movements that he almost never seems exhausted—outside his green zone, if you will—unless he means to. When he’s handling the ball, the whole offense slows down to whatever pace he deems proper. But when he decides to truly go, it is only ever at full speed. That combination of tactical exertion and rapid decision-making, plus his size (6-foot-7, 230 pounds), makes him an unstoppable force on both ends of the floor. 

“He’s fast, but he doesn’t always use that speed,” says Moe Harkless, who’s now a teammate but up until this season was an opposing defender. “He plays at his own pace, so he uses bursts of speed as opposed to always trying to go, go, go. That’s tougher to guard as a defender than a guy who you know has more speed because he can score in many different ways.” 

Sometimes, you can see the exact moment when the switch flips. Leonard’s shoulders drop, his feet shuffle forward, and his dribble picks up speed as he gets low to the ground. Defenders are often caught flat-footed, and by the time they realize what’s happening it’s too late. Other times, he’s more deceptive, staying put in the corner until the ball finds him, or using a hesitation dribble that slows the game down to his preferred pace. That’s when he attacks:

It’s the same way on defense, where his load has been helped by rarely having to cover the best guy on the opposing team (that’s why you trade for Paul George). Kawhi is content to play free safety and roam the floor until he finds the right pocket of time and space to disrupt. On this possession, he barely moves before he makes the steal: 

And on this one, he waits until the right moment to sprint and erase Dwight Howard’s dunk attempt: 

This kind of economy of activity isn’t common, simply because most players either can’t afford to be this calculated or they aren’t superstars, who both have the leverage to play this way and the talent to excel at it. 

In May 2018, ESPN’s Brian Windhorst wrote about LeBron’s efforts to manage his energy in order to maximize his impact as he aged. Windhorst noted that LeBron was one of the slower players in the league, walking 74 percent of the time while on the floor, according to Second Spectrum data. James would also do things like not always go for the chasedown block or spend most of an offensive possession in the corner, which is something Kawhi has done this season too. James’s strategy is in line with the leaguewide trend toward prioritizing health. (This season, LeBron’s average speed is even slower than in 2017-18.) Leonard is following a similar approach. 

As Leonard’s usage and offensive production have risen the past few seasons, his minutes have dipped. And, according to tracking data from NBA.com/Stats, the amount of miles he’s averaging per game has declined, as has his speed. Like LeBron in 2017-18, Kawhi is essentially using the luxury of his elite talent and superstar status to do less now in order to do more later. Kawhi has further helped himself this season by rounding out his game. He’s lowered the frequency of his isolation plays by 3 percent, but his touches are up by six a game, his potential assists are up by more than four a game, and his points created off assists are up by more than five a game—the latter two are both career highs. 

“You look at his body and you think he’s going to run around and beat everybody up, but he doesn’t let anybody rush him,” Suns head coach Monty Williams says. “He has his own pace, he’s picked that up the last five or six years. I remember when he first came to San Antonio, he was all over the place, but now he seems to be more efficient.” 

Kawhi has found the center of the Venn diagram between production and load management. And he’s done it at a time when players are covering more ground than ever even as their minutes decrease, as NBC’s Tom Haberstroh pointed out. 

Distance covered isn’t a perfect metric to measure a player’s load. As Ted Polglaze, a sports scientist in Australia who conducted his PhD study on the energetic demands of team sports, notes, it doesn’t fully account for starts and stops, which put extra stress on a player’s joints. Nor does it factor in the amount of contact that players endure throughout a game. But in basketball, if you are covering more distance, you’re also likely doing more of the starting and stopping that takes a toll on players. 

“The two things that the body doesn’t like is deceleration and torque—turning,” Vitti says. “That’s when [players are] most at risk … when you try to slow down, that is when you get hurt.” 

Basketball’s pace is the fastest it’s been since the late ’80s, which has meant more deceleration, and subsequently more stress on players’ bodies that goes beyond contact or how many minutes they have played. Think of it as inflation. Forty minutes of basketball in the 1980s is not the same as 40 minutes of basketball in the 2010s.  

One physical trainer currently working with an NBA team says it’s impossible for casual fans to see just how stressful today’s game is on players’ bodies, not to mention their minds. It’s why nutrition, sleep, training, and recovery have all become nearly as important as the game itself. 

“These days, there’s a lot of evidence to support that recovery is a factor that is equally as important, if not more, to training itself,” Rey says. He is part of a group that conducted a study on soccer players in the Champions League and found evidence that the median age of players in the tournament has risen due to an increased emphasis on load management and recovery. “When those things are systematically prioritized and implemented, a player’s career can be extended. And once he retires, his health will be better than a player who hasn’t done that.” 

Though Kawhi rarely reveals personal details, he did admit after the first game against the Spurs that long-term health is a priority that goes beyond his own benefit. “I just want to be able to walk strong when I’m done playing this game” he said. “My son motivates me to keep playing. Once he gets to the age to play basketball, I want to be able to play with him still.”

Joe Abunassar got used to the long nights after games; it was part of the gig. As Kevin Garnett’s longtime trainer, he would spend about an hour with Garnett after every game going through a routine that included massages and methodical stretching. 

“He was always the last one out,” said Abunassar, who has worked with numerous NBA players and runs the IMPACT basketball training center in Las Vegas. “He was really ahead of the time as far as having his own massage therapist travel with him, things that a lot of the top players do today, but he was way ahead of his time with taking care of his body.” 

Abunassar says that while the physical benefits were obvious, the mental part of the ritual also became essential for Garnett’s success. Both Rey and Polglaze have noticed that in their research, too. 

“Maybe physiologically, that method of recovery isn’t doing that much for me, but psychologically, I believe I am feeling better recovered,” Rey says. “And if the day after tomorrow I play in another game, which is the case in the NBA ... my performance will be better. Recovery methods have an effect on the psychological mind-set of the player more so than physiological or muscular, even.” 

That mental aspect also extends to how players go about exerting themselves in the game. Polglaze points out a study where athletes were set up to play three different types of rugby games—one they were told would be 12 minutes long, another they were told would be six minutes followed by another six-minute match, and one they weren’t given a time frame for. The results showed that players altered their pacing strategy and performed differently based on the knowledge of how long the games would be (Polglaze added that similar results have been found in other team sports, like soccer and water polo). Apply that to the NBA, and you get a player like Kawhi, who knows he will play about 30 to 34 minutes each game and knows approximately when he will get taken out. That all helps him manage his physical exertion. 

“You want to prepare athletes, or condition them, so that they can go hard for longer periods,” Polglaze says. “But that doesn’t mean that they have to go hard. If they can be controlling the game, and beating their opponent operating at 75 percent, then it’s kind of wasted energy to go that extra 100 percent.” 

It’s clear that Kawhi, who has already suffered a knee injury this season, hasn’t been 100 percent dating back to last season. But it’s also clear that even while limited, he can still be one of the best players in the league. 

Polglaze compares him to a famous field hockey player named Jamie Dwyer. Dwyer was never the fastest guy on the field, but as he got older he became known for deceiving opponents by coming onto the field slowly and not running full speed until he had to: “You want the capacity to play the game at a high intensity, but the smarts to only use it when you need to,” Polglaze says. “It’s not about getting athletes to do more, or being able to do more, it’s about them getting the same outcome from doing less. Because that way if you’re doing less, that means you’ve still got more up your sleeve. That you can take it up a notch if you need to.” 

When you talk to teammates or opponents, no one ever says Kawhi is the fastest player on the court either. But the ways in which he deploys his speed and strength is what makes him nearly unbeatable.

“No one can stop Kawhi,” said Patrick Beverley, who has also had to defend Leonard in the past. “He plays the game so patiently, when it’s time to turn it on, he turns it on, when it’s time to get a stop he gets a stop.”  

In every one of Kawhi’s nine seasons in the league, his minutes have gone up once the playoffs begin. His teams have also never missed the playoffs. Because of that, he, LeBron, and a handful of others are really the only players who are familiar with the demands those long seasons take year after year. Once you get to the playoffs, the wall that Vitti refers to can no longer be moved; it needs to be broken through. Kawhi showed last season he can do just that, even while limited. He has decided he needs to pace himself until then—whether it’s game to game or possession to possession.  

After seven minutes speaking with the media that Halloween night against the Spurs, Leonard got up from his seat, walked the length of the Staples Center tunnel toward the exit, and left. Ushers and arena workers were finally clear to fold up the chairs, take down the last Clippers banner, and remove the TV lights. 

Nearly two months later, Kawhi faced the Spurs again, this time in San Antonio, where he put up an ultra-efficient 26 points in 27 minutes and got the win. Rivers said it was as sharp as he’s ever seen Kawhi. Yet, as has become custom, Kawhi sat out the second game of the back-to-back the following night in Oklahoma City. The Clippers lost. Overall, though, the strategy seems to be working—the Clippers are 22-10 and 18-5 in games Kawhi has played. By comparison, LeBron has missed only one game for the 24-6 Lakers (they lost), but Rivers’s words on each team’s different management strategies will echo until the playoffs: “We’ll see at the end.” 

Paolo Uggetti