AAGS 2021

27 numbers. However, it’s very interesting how to manage the whole schedule. Regarding your question, how you adapt to the many games, well you don’t practice that much. Actually, you have two groups and that’s the way that I like to approach it. You have group A, the players that play 25 minutes or more per game and for the players that play less than 25 minutes, you approach them in a different way. For those starters or main players, you barely practice, because the game is giving you the stimulus that you need to maintain your physicality or build up during the season. I believe you don’t need physical stimulus during practice. I know is not a very popular answer and probably coaches don’t like this answer. I understand coaches. I think I’m empathic with them because they need time for the tactics, the skill development and to build things in the group. You can have that time with them, but with a lower physical load, or you can do shorter trainings with high intensity to maintain those levels that you need. It is a very different approach. In Spain and in European basketball, you have one game per week. So, you need practice days during the week to have the stimulus that you need for the competition. However, the moment that you start playing two, three or four games a week, you’d need a different stimulus. It’s probably more around building tactics, detail correction, team building and less about game and competition demands. Depending on your position, if you are usually a middle to bottom team, you need to be more prepared at the beginning to win games at the beginning, so you have less time to build up physicality. However, if you are in a middle or top-ranking team, you are going to have time to use those games to build that. It’s a completely different approach and coaches sometimes struggle with that, and I understand. It’s just that you must understand how much competition stimulus you have because of the congestive schedule and work around that for practice, not the other way around.