Are NBA two-a-days still a thing?
We checked in with all 30 teams to get a handle on how they approach training camp in this era when front offices, coaches and medical staffs think constantly about how to avoid overtaxing players
In the Load Management Era, teams typically start every season exercising greater caution than they did the previous season.
You got a glimpse of that Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, where the Lakers hosted the Brooklyn Nets in the NBA’s maiden exhibition game for the 2021-22 season … with LeBron James, Russell Westbrook, Carmelo Anthony, Kevin Durant, James Harden and Kyrie Irving all in street clothes.
Further evidence: Practicing twice a day, once a staple of training camps leaguewide, continues to dwindle toward extinction. When I started covering the NBA in the mid-1990s, it was standard for teams to hold two-a-days — at least until the eight-game exhibition season started. Many years (and pounds for me) later, teams play four to six preseason games rather than eight and have steadily moved away from the two-a-days model for the past decade or so. We’ve reached the point now that less than half of the league’s 30 teams persist with at least one scheduled burst of two-a-days during training camp.
The Lakers and the Washington Wizards, for example, scheduled two-a-days only once last week. The famously hard-driving Miami Heat still favor two-a-days, but only the early session takes place on the court, with evening sessions often devoted to team meetings.
“My rookie year was a month of two-a-days and eight preseason games,” Philadelphia 76ers coach Doc Rivers said Monday, recalling his first season as a player with the Atlanta Hawks in 1983-84. “I hated the eight preseason games, so that part we got right [by shortening the exhibition schedule].
“It really depends who your team is, but the week of [training] camp is absurd to me,” Rivers continued. “I think you should have more time. Two weeks would be great. No two-a-days is fine, but if you got more time I think you would actually limit injuries [rather] than have more. … You’ve just got to adjust and I think every coach and everyone has done that. But I do think health-wise it would be smarter if we had more time.”
This is an excerpt from my latest NBA report. For full access to this and all of my Substack pieces, please join our community as a full subscriber.