AAGS 2021

33 Scola: In the NBA, one of the particular things about it is the schedule is not fixed. It’s not like European soccer for example, where you play on Sundays or you play once a week; or you play on the weekends in the national league and on Wednesday or Thursday you play in the European competitions. In the NBA, the schedule is a little bit all over the place. There are some weeks that you are going to play five games the one week, and then some weeks that you going to play two. They’re actually the two edges, where the minimum is two and the maximum is five. And as crazy as it sounds, the five games a week, they’re not as hard. There’s one thing called the four-five, so four games in five nights. Those are the hardest because usually, it’s in four different cities. You play one of them at home and three others are on the road. So, basically in four different cities in five days and you have to play in each one of them. So that’s the hardest part. And it’s a big challenge for us, the players with 82 games which is just the regular season, then there is play offs. The player that makes it all the way to the end will have four rounds of seven playoff games. So, it could be up to 20-28 more games. But the regular season is 82 games. How do you look at your peak performance? How do you manage your body and competition to be at the elite? Do you taper down and then go up? Scola: It’s a big topic in the NBA, it’s called load management. Some teams, they get their superstars, their best players, and they choose a peak: where they are going to play, which games they are going to sit out and how they’re going to rest them and how are they going to find a way to be fresh for the most important games in the regular season, and the playoffs. When I was there, it was not so much of these things with us. It was to just try to get the players to play every game, and it was hard. It was most likely players tried to manage that on their own. I think the system in the NBA now is a lot more elaborated. There’s a lot of data science behind it. They also figure out rotations from the physiological point of view. So how many minutes can a player play before his productions start diminishing? How many minutes does he have to rest before he can come back? And how many times can this player repeat these throughout one game and then through a week, and then through a whole season? So, it’s much more elaborate right now. Usually when you see the rotation of teams in the NBA today, it is different than