Measuring "The Spurs Effect"

And so the Xeroxing began. Case in point: Look at how the minutes leaderboard has transformed. Last season, 33 players averaged more than 35 minutes per game -- or about one per team. This season after the Spurs won it all? That total is 17, sliced nearly in half. How about the number of players who play more than 30 minutes per game? A total of 84 players this season, down from 99 last season and 120 as recently as 2008-09.

What's happening here? After seeing the above numbers, one longtime general manager responded bluntly:

"The Spurs Effect."

Granted, the Spurs' influence might not be the sole reason stars are playing less and less. But it's certainly more than random luck that after the Spurs win the title, we see the biggest year-to-year drop in 35-minute guys and 30-minute guys in almost two decades (excluding lockout seasons).

The key question is whether copying the Spurs' model is wise or merely a fool's errand. After all, the Spurs have three future Hall of Famers in the latter half of their careers. Good luck trying to replicate that. And Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili are nearing 40 years old. They're mostly rested by necessity, not strategy.

So should teams really be adopting the Spurs' strategy by resting their stars? And does going deep into your bench actually make you a better team? I consulted the numbers and talked to a trio of "Pop" disciples -- Golden State coach Steve Kerr, Atlanta coach Mike Budenholzer and Philadelphia coach Brett Brown -- to find out how difficult it really is to spread the Spurs' gospel.

The league-wide sea change

The NBA was different back in December 1996. That was when a man by the name of Gregg Popovich took over for Bob Hill as the head coach of the San Antonio Spurs. Ray Allen was a rookie. Shaquille O'Neal was making his purple-and-gold debut for the Lakers. Andrew Wiggins had yet to celebrate his second birthday.

But the biggest league-wide shift might be how coaches handle playing time. Despite Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau's best hard-charging efforts, the 40-minute guy -- a mainstay of the NBA player pool -- is a dinosaur. In 2000-01, a total of 13 players averaged more than 40 minutes per game including names like Allen Iverson, Tracy McGrady and Antoine Walker. Many of them washed out before turning 33. Today, no player is averaging 40 minutes per game and it's been that way since 2011-12.

The biggest decline can be seen in the 35-minute player. In 1996-97, a whopping 67 players averaged at least 35 minutes per game -- or about two per team. In 2009-10, there were 44. Last season, there were 33. Today? That number has shrunk to just 17. Judging by the decline of the past decade, the 35-minute player is on target to go the way of the 40-minute player by 2017-18: extinct.

Looking around the league, you can see stars shaving minutes all over. A sampling: Stephen Curry (36.5 last season to 33.2 this season); Klay Thompson (35.4 to 32.6); Kevin Durant (38.5 to 33.8); Carmelo Anthony (league-high 38.7 to 35.7); Kevin Love (36.3 to 34.5); Dwyane Wade (32.9 to 31.8); Monta Ellis (36.9 to 33.8); Chandler Parsons (37.6 to 33.1). Even James Harden, who has had to anchor the Houston Rockets without Dwight Howard for a big chunk of the season, has seen his playing time drop from 38 minutes per game to 36.5 minutes per game.

One league executive suggests that tanking is the bigger driver on the decline of minutes, not the Spurs. The thinking goes that a wider gap between the "haves" and "have-nots" may lead to more blowouts and more garbage time when stars hit the pine. But even if we remove games against the Knicks, Lakers and 76ers, there are only 18 players with more than 35 minutes per game this season. Something bigger is going on.

There's some recent evidence that high minutes might be prohibitive to a team's title chances. Over the past 10 seasons, 104 players have logged more than 3,000 minutes in a season. None of those 104 players went on to win the championship in their respective season. The last to do so was Ben Wallace for the Detroit Pistons back in 2003-04.

Will resting guys continue to be a trend? Is limiting stars' minutes the right thing to do? And how hard is it to sit stars knowing it might hurt the team in the short term? Let's hear what the coaches themselves have to say.

Winning by sitting

Steve Kerr won two titles in four seasons playing for Popovich. In Kerr's first season as general manager of the Phoenix Suns, the Spurs ousted his team in the first round of the 2007-08 playoffs. In 2009-10, Kerr faced the Spurs again in the playoffs, this time sweeping Popovich's squad in four games in the West semifinals. From his comments while calling countless Spurs games over the years as a Turner broadcaster, it's evident that Kerr has great admiration for his former coach.

But Kerr is quick to point out that the Spurs are not your average NBA organization. And thus, it's almost impossible to copy their model.

"They're unique," Kerr said. "First of all, they have three Hall of Famers who are still playing at an extremely high level. And they've been together for ... since I was there in 2003 and retired, they were all there. And I'm old."

To Kerr, the continuity and confidence of the Spurs' organization is what sets them apart.

"When you've won titles and you have the confidence that 'we're good enough to make the playoffs' and all that, it becomes a lot easier to employ that [rest] strategy."

Popovich has been known to sit Duncan, Ginobili and Parker on back-to-backs. No team has sat out its guys to rest more than the Spurs this season (nine times). The benefits of sitting the starters, Kerr points out, are two-fold.

"The result is that you get rest for the Hall of Famers and you get experience for the second-unit guys," Kerr said. "When the bench guys come into the Finals and play well, it's not a coincidence. It's because they've been groomed for it all season long."

But is it practical to do that in the win-at-all-costs culture of the NBA head coach?

"Most of us don't have that luxury," Kerr said with a chuckle. "We're just trying to get to the playoffs."

Kerr respects the Spurs' uniqueness, and he has absorbed some of Pop's principles. Namely, he's taken a hard look at his own players' minutes this season. Collectively, Curry and Thompson have seen their minutes drop by 5.5 minutes per game. For perspective, Curry played 38.2 minutes per game in 2012-13.

"I do believe in rest," Kerr said. "I do believe in pacing our guys. I don't want our guys to play 40 minutes a night. There will be games that we do, but where are Steph and Klay in the minutes?"

I tell him 33.2 and 32.6 minutes per game.

"32 is a great number if we can do that," Kerr said. "Because it is a long year and we do have a good team, so we don't feel like we need to extend our guys every single night and try like hell to win every game immediately. We trust our second unit. We have a really deep team. We feel like we can manage minutes, manage the season and hopefully get to the playoffs in a healthy state."

Kerr is taking the long view here, the same perspective that Popovich instilled in him as his coach. But Kerr isn't the only head coach practicing what Popovich preached. After serving as Popovich's assistant coach ever since he got the job in 1996-97, Budenholzer has applied similar principles for his Atlanta Hawks team, which has often been dubbed "Spurs East" ever since he took over last season.

Al Horford averaged 37.2 minutes per game in 2012-13, but Budenholzer shaved that down to 33.0 last season and now just 30.7 this season. None of his four All-Stars averages over 34 minutes per game. And the team is on pace to register 64 wins, which would be a franchise best.

Budenholzer has noticed the league-wide trend and agrees that we're seeing the so-called "Spurs Effect" rub off on the rest of the league.

"I think Pop deserves a ton of credit," Budenholzer said," but I also think you have to credit the players, too. They've done their part in buying into it and understanding the big picture and appreciating what's really important -- the playoffs. To succeed in the long term, you may have to make short-term sacrifices."

Like Kerr, Budenholzer thinks the Spurs can teach us lessons about how to manage a team's minutes, but copying their blueprint is easier said than done.

"You're never going to ..." Budenholzer said before he caught himself. "You should never say never [laughs], but it's going to be hard to replicate having that kind of core with three Hall of Famers. But I think there's probably something that everybody has learned from. Whoever your best players are, whoever your core is, put them in the position to have a higher goal. How can you maximize your long-term goal?"

That's where Pop has made his mark, Budenholzer says.

"Pop has done it in a creative, progressive unique way," Budenholzer said. He's challenging all of us across the league. How can you motivate your players to play at a high level for as long as possible?"

Budenholzer admits that Popovich and the Spurs' success has made it easier for him to sell his players on sacrificing short-term minutes and per-game numbers for the chance at long-term success. But he also credits a general culture change among star players. The Spurs are making it cool to put the long term ahead of the short term.

Less macho, more glory

When broaching the topic of a "Spurs Effect" with an Eastern Conference GM, he brought up the growing maturity of players.

"There's less machismo in the game now," the executive said. "Players have more perspective and are more conscious about their careers."

Perhaps this is a product of the Spurs. But Budenholzer doesn't think it's a coincidence that stars are more willing to share their success among teammates rather than trying to do it all by themselves, all the time.

"The thing that is really interesting to me is the macho element of players," Budenholzer said. "They've trained their whole life to play every minute and every second. It's drilled in athletes to go hard, hard, hard all the time. And there's a lot to be said for that. There's nothing that can replace that mental and physical aspect. These are tough, hard-ass guys.

"The hardest thing to do is to convince the player that they're just as tough if you play a couple minutes less or not practicing today," Budenholzer said. "They are hard-asses no matter what. Even when Pop talked about defense, you don't have to go harder, you have to go smarter. When we use our brains, that's where the special things happen. You have to reshape what it means to be tough and smart. That's the trick."

You can hear Budenholzer's irritation when it's suggested that today's athletes are softer than they were 10-20 years ago.

"That's stupid to me," Budenholzer said. "To me, the defense, the effort, the exertion is higher than ever. Guys are playing harder, they're giving us more, the defense is much more advanced now. People can be stubborn and look at these guys like they're machines [with higher minutes], but that's stupid to me. For long-term success, you have to look at the big picture."

Leaning on a deep bench a cause or effect? This is the question that gets at the very heart of it all. Did the Spurs win 62 games last season en route to a championship despite relying heavily on their bench or because of it?

If the latter is the case, then we'd see coaches everywhere give their reserves 20-25 minutes a night. It's slowly happening already. The tradeoff is that the starters give 30 great minutes instead of 35 so-so ones. Those last five minutes are where fatigue drags on their performance while raising the likelihood of injury at the same time. Every five minutes not on the floor is five minutes they can't get injured.

To Kerr and Budenholzer, reliance on the bench to save their starters coupled with an organizational dedication to player depth is the key to winning in the long term.

"I would say unequivocally it's because of their bench," Budenholzer said. "It's so hard to play against them on a night-in and night-out basis because they have so many guys that can play and play at such a high level for 25 or 30 minutes."

Kerr's feelings on the matter echo Budenholzer's. But roster construction goes a long way.

"Personnel is everything," Kerr said. "I guarantee you if we didn't have the personnel to have faith in the second group, I'd play Steph [Curry] and Klay [Thompson] more minutes. It's a lot easier to do when you can bring in Shaun Livingston and Andre Iguodala in to play point guard if something happens to Shaun [Livingston]. The versatility of our roster allows us to cut down on minutes."

Most coaches would probably commit crimes to have Golden State's depth. With Livingston, Iguodala, Leandro Barbosa, David Lee and Marreese Speights coming off the bench, their second five is probably better than some teams' first five.

But the Spurs have supported their stars with mostly castoffs. Boris Diaw was a waiver pickup. Cory Joseph has split his time between the NBA and the D-League. Matt Bonner was basically a throw-in in a 2006 trade and sat on the bench for two seasons before becoming a fixture in the rotation. Danny Green's career was on life support before the Spurs developed him. Same goes for Patty Mills.

Maybe there is something to Insider David Thorpe's theory of royal jelly.

The long-term goal

Let's be honest: It's easier for Kerr and Budenholzer to endorse Popovich's principles when they're winning a gazillion games. But the biggest Popovich supporter comes from a coach who hasn't seen the success yet in the win-loss column: Philadelphia coach Brett Brown, a longtime assistant of Popovich.

It's no coincidence that the Sixers hired a Popovich disciple to lead their long-term rebuild. Brown agrees that the league is taking Popovich's lead with the decrease in minutes. Now, sports science companies that provide injury prevention analytics like Catapult Sports and Zebra have made managing player exertion a top priority.

"The Spurs have something to do with that," Brown said. "It's quite interesting for me because I spent so long there. Things that kind of happened organically have grown over the years to have titles like 'analytics' or 'sports science.' A lot of that originally was Pop's gut feel. I think resting players, which Pop became very much known for and his gutsy moves on when to rest players, now morphs into what the wellness people and the sports science people are advocating. They really make you pay attention."

More than ever, attention is being paid to the well-being of players. For example, following every game, the Sixers' players have four stations of recovery workouts before hopping on the team plane to make sure they're fresh for the next game.

"This is a recovery league," Brown said. "To play at the level we're all trying to play at, I just think that the minutes have to come down. It is a grueling league. It's an unforgiving, punishing league.

"

To play at the level we're all trying to play at, I just think that the minutes have to come down. It is a grueling league. It's an unforgiving, punishing league.

"-- Brett Brown, Sixers head coach

"And when you really look at what you have to do to play in May and June, the average fan has no idea how the game changes. The playoffs are a different sport. To walk a team down through April and then re-deliver a playoff team into late April, May and June -- that in itself is an art. Pop is a master of that and quite possibly influenced a lot of coaches as he has in several areas."

That exchange between the short term and the long term is one of the toughest obstacles that any coach faces. As Brown learned in San Antonio, relying on the bench must come with job security.

"It is a lot easier said than done because we're all competitive," Brown said. "We want to win every single period, every single game. When you can bite your lip and look a little further with a greater lens, it allows you to show a level of patience and poise to try to see what the endgame is."

Like Budenholzer and Kerr, the bench is key. "It's a lot easier to have that luxury to choose that path when you actually have a very, very deep bench," Brown said. "I can see why other teams are trying to walk teams down and try to have fresh bodies at the end of the season."

Though teams are managing minutes and placing a greater emphasis on the science of recovery, Brown thinks we're just getting started.

"I think it's a big part of the future -- how do you get NBA guys to be educated about their bodies?" he said. "With 82 games, how do they recover?"

Where do we go from here?

Minutes have been going down across the board with the exception of Chicago. Thibodeau has famously been the anti-Pop in this sense. Since taking over head-coaching duties in 2010-11, five of the 12 highest minutes per game seasons belong to Chicago players (Luol Deng three times; Jimmy Butler twice). Since 2011-12, four of the top six hail from Thibodeau's squads.

Thibodeau's approach has been steadfast in regard to playing time. Earlier this season, he told the Chicago Tribune: "There's the school of thought that less minutes are better. There's also the school of thought that when you do less, you also become deconditioned."

Thibodeau certainly knows a thing or two about winning. But that's mostly confined to the regular season. Just three teams have won more regular-season games than Chicago (241) since Thibodeau took over in 2010-11: the Spurs (265), Thunder (253) and Heat (248).

But watch what happens when we look to those four teams' playoff success. The Spurs have won 43 games and a championship since 2010-11. The Thunder have won 37 postseason games and a Western Conference championship. The Heat have won two titles in four Finals appearances to give them 59 overall wins. On average, those three organizations have 46 playoff wins. Thibodeau's Bulls?

Just 17.

Thibodeau's Bulls have yet to translate their regular-season success to the postseason because of some combination of untimely injuries, burnout or just plain, old luck. Even now, Thibodeau appears to be a relic from another NBA era.

With Rose out for the season with a meniscus tear after playing 10 back-to-backs and three games with more than 40 minutes, the spotlight on Thibodeau's old-school approach will be brighter than ever. Butler, despite a history of stress fractures in his legs, is playing far and away more minutes than anybody else. Joakim Noah has been hobbled all season with a troublesome knee and Taj Gibson has been playing with a torn ligament in his hand. At 34, Pau Gasol is playing more minutes per game (34.8) than the highest-minute player on 15 separate teams.

Indeed, June has been elusive for Thibodeau. Winning in January isn't the goal. Winning in June is the real prize.

"At the end of the day, that's what we're aiming for," Budenholzer said. "The really good GMs, the really good coaches, the really good players -- June is the goal. Pop has created a little more of a looking at the big picture. Where do we want to go? And how do you get there?"