We expected a cascade of injuries to the resumption of the NBA season in the “bubble” since the basketball players had to stop for many months, without having access to the training centers of their teams. But ultimately, except for the players infected with Covid-19 just before arriving at Disney World, everything went well.
On the contrary, there were ultimately less injuries than during a normal recovery. On the RunRepeat site, Dimitrije Curcic thus made a comparative analysis of the number of injuries during the 172 games played on the Florida campus (89 regular season games and 83 playoff games). The result is that there have been 28% fewer missed games due to injuries in the “bubble” than the average over the past five seasons, compared to the first 89 games of various regular seasons.
Injuries were also less serious (2.9 games missed by injury, compared to 3.7 games over the previous five years) and there was also a 31% drop in the number of games missed due to injuries in the playoffs.
Greater collective discipline
A phenomenon that could be explained by the absence of travel and the better recovery, especially in terms of sleep.
“The many trips with crossing time zones, in the literature, it is well identified as a major factor”, confirms Mathieu Nédélec, researcher in physiology applied to high-level sport at INSEP. ” This is a solid assumption, but there is another. In these cases, when the players are together at the hotel, there is a collective rhythm that is established, with relatively strict meal times and the waking / sleeping rhythms are better suited in greenhouses or internships. training, rather than when athletes are on their own and free to organize their sleep / wake rhythm. “
This is also what Frank Kuhn, the preparer of the French team, had explained to us.
“They had everything on site, namely recovery and training equipment”, he told us last month. “Somewhere the bubble was a bit like coaching the national team on a summer campaign. We are in autarky. When we have the players from morning to night, when we can have them lunch together, we pay attention to food and diet. We pay attention to recovery. We have physios (physiotherapist masseur), physical trainers and we optimize performance. The first matches were complicated for everyone, with false rhythms and teams that gave up very quickly, but that quickly improved and that doesn’t surprise me because they were in autarky. To me, that’s the advantage of the bubble. “
An impossible adaptation to crossing time zones
As for the role of sleep on injuries, Mathieu Nédélec explains that the link is still to be consolidated, scientific studies on the subject being still limited and often retrospective (the athletes being questioned about their sleep following their injuries).
“For our part, we followed a footballer who played in Ligue 1 and the Champions League, we controlled all these nights of sleep for four months. He was offered an actimeter, a small watch that allowed him to obtain objective data on sleep, and it was observed that there were indeed sleep variables that were altered both the night and the week preceding the day. occurrence of an injury. He was injured three times over the four month period and indeed the time to fall asleep and the efficiency of his sleep were altered the night and week before the injury, compared to his previously established normal sleep. . “
How to explain it? One of the hypotheses is that in the event of sleep restriction or insufficient sleep, “Reaction time could be lengthened and decision-making altered”, which could generate “From a neuromuscular point of view an increased risk of injury”, continue Mathieu Nédélec.
And NBA players are also particularly exposed since incessant travel takes them across multiple time zones. “It is well established that after crossing three time zones, there is a“ jetlag ”which is set up, that is to say a phase shift of the biological clock. It is particularly complicated towards the East, since you have to advance your internal clock by waking up earlier while towards the West, you move it back by going to bed later and it is easier. “
This means that NBA players do not necessarily have to synchronize with local time when crossing one or two time zones. On the other hand, journeys from the West coast to the East coast are difficult, since Mathieu Nédélec details that we consider that on average one day of adaptation on site is necessary for each time zone crossed towards the East (half a day to the west). For the Tokyo Olympics, athletes leaving France will therefore probably have to spend at least a week there to adapt their biological clock.
In the NBA, for example, the Lakers who fly from Los Angeles to play in Boston would therefore (on average, the needs being different from one athlete to another) need three days on site to be fully effective. With the pace of the league schedule, this is obviously impossible and we therefore understand the benefits of playing all games in the same place, without constantly crossing time zones.
