Tag: Joe Rogowski

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NBA tries to learn from painful injury lessons last year

The potshots have come at the Golden State Warriors from all directions this offseason. Some rivals have dismissed their breathtaking championship run with a wave of the hand and a snort.

The Warriors just got lucky, they said. They were able to stay mostly healthy for the entire grueling season, avoiding the big injuries that plagued so many other contenders, both in the regular season and in the playoffs.

Considering the stack of injuries that ruined some seasons, keeping 15 players healthy should be viewed as a tremendous accomplishment, not just a random gift from the basketball gods.

As the NBA prepares to tip off the regular season on Tuesday, the biggest issue facing a league on the upswing may not be labor strife or the age limit for draft eligibility. After a season in which star after star missed huge chunks of time, one of the biggest priorities is player health.

“I think what we saw in this season and in the playoffs, especially, is there is no question that injuries had a big impact on the competition,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said. “Not that that’s anything new. One of the things we’re looking at as a league is what can we do to keep players on the floor?”

The numbers last year were staggering. Eight players on the NBA’s list of most popular-selling jerseys missed at least 15 percent of the 82 regular season games, including LeBron James (13 games missed), Blake Griffin (15), Derrick Rose (31) and Russell Westbrook (15).

Kevin Durant (55), Carmelo Anthony (42), Dwight Howard (41), Paul George (76) and Kobe Bryant (47) are among the stars who missed at least half the season and seven of the top 10 draft picks — not including Philadelphia’s Dario Saric, who played in Europe — missed significant time with injuries.

Injuries to Cleveland stars Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving in the playoffs hampered the Cavaliers’ ability to hang with the Warriors in the finals, while the Miami Heat (Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh missed 58 games combined) and Oklahoma City Thunder (Westbrook, Durant and Serge Ibaka missed 88 games) did not make the playoffs for the first time in years due mostly to their missing stars.

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From overtraining at the AAU level to poor sleep patterns developed during the season’s unforgiving travel schedule, the theories are many as to the number of injuries. And efforts are coming on all fronts to address the scourge.

The NBA changed the schedule to drastically reduce the number of back-to-backs and stretches of four games in five nights in hopes of easing some of the stress on players’ bodies. The NBA Players’ Association hired Joe Rogowski, a well-regarded strength coach and athletic trainer, as its new sports science guru. Teams across the league are revamping their training and medical staffs and building new practice facilities to try to cater to player health.

The Warriors, Minnesota Timberwolves, Atlanta Hawks, Milwaukee Bucks and Detroit Pistons have all brought in new medical and/or training personnel while the Wolves have partnered with the world-renowned Mayo Clinic to open a $25 million practice center that includes a chef on site to prepare healthy meals and a sports medicine wing with MRI machines and physicians available for immediate consultation.

“I think it’s still too early to say this is why these injuries are happening,” said Rogowski. “But we are doing our due diligence. There are so many variables that are involved with injuries. So being able to look at all the different variables and not just one thing is very important.”

Silver is pushing teams to share more on what methods and technologies they are using to combat injuries. Some teams consider that proprietary and are reluctant to give it.

“I don’t want to see our teams just competing in terms of best practices when it comes to the health and welfare of the players,” Silver said. “Teams can learn from each other and can apply it to the league as a whole. As you heard (Warriors coach) Steve Kerr say, as great as it is to win, you want to win with both teams best players on the floor.”

It’s a good line, but one that may fall on deaf ears when presented to hyper-competitive teams looking for any edge.

“The league feels like it’s a priority but it’s a little interesting,” Dallas Mavericks head athletic trainer Casey Smith said. “Every team is their own entity. There are many of us that do share best practices quite often on all levels and there are some, frankly, that don’t. That’s their decision.”

Smith has kept the Mavericks at the forefront of sports science technology for years, teaming with coach Rick Carlisle and owner Mark Cuban to aggressively examine ways to keep their players healthy. From sleep studies to biomechanics and GPS tracking technology, the Mavericks are throwing everything they have at one of the league’s fundamental problems.

While they have embraced the need for players to rest during the season, Smith said it’s also important to make sure a resting player gets in a hard workout on his “off day.” Dirk Nowitzki may not do the cutting, accelerating and decelerating and physical contact that he does during a game, but he will go through a weight-lifting and cardio workout so that his body remains in “active recovery.”

“Although we may limit them from the court at times, we still very much expect some type of demand on their bodies to keep them at that highest threshold,” Smith said, “which I think surprises people sometimes.”

Smith is a big believer in studying movement patterns and trying to reduce the biomechanical asymmetry that can put greater stress on joints and muscles. That also requires athletes to do the same, often tedious, warmups and exercises every day to foster the needed muscle memory.

Timberwolves president Flip Saunders coaxed long-time Pistons physical therapist Arnie Kander out of retirement after enduring a season that saw 10 of his players miss significant time with injuries. Kander spent more than two decades in Detroit and gained a reputation for using unusual methods and contraptions to help keep players healthy.

“When you have four or five of your best players out, the game is less,” Kander said. “I’m a basketball fan. I happen to work in the NBA. So I like to see a better game.”

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/2015/10/24/nba-tries-to-learn-from-painful-injury-lessons-of-last-year/74514168/

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Moneyball 2.0: Keeping players healthy

In locker rooms across the country, amid the pads, sticks, balls and helmets, sports teams are increasingly relying on a new piece of equipment. It’s typically about the size of a thin flip phone and is worn in the middle of an athlete’s back, usually under a compression shirt. When the biometric sensor starts whirring to life, every athletic movement, every heartbeat and every muscle twitch is converted into numbers, arming teams with more information than ever about an athlete’s performance, potential and health.

The end result is the latest offshoot of the burgeoning analytics world, where teams are leaning on technology and data to not just prevent and rehabilitate injuries but to predict them.

When “Moneyball” hit the scene a dozen years ago and analytics in sports went mainstream, both fans and teams thought of the newfangled statistics in terms of in-game strategy and roster building. Innovative and complex measurements were used to evaluate players in new and revealing ways. But the more recent analytics revolution has focused on health, injuries and keeping players on the field.

“Everybody’s trying to figure out the perfect formula, but there isn’t a perfect formula right now,” said Joe Rogowski, the NBA Players Association’s recently appointed director of sports medicine and research. “It changes every day. Every day there’s new companies coming out with new devices, measuring this and promising that.”

Rogowski came into the NBA a decade ago, focusing on strength and conditioning first with the Orlando Magic and most recently with the Houston Rockets, regarded by many as one of the NBA’s leaders in their use of analytics. “When I started in the league, I think I was one of two teams that was looking at heart rate,” he said. “Now almost everybody has looked at that.”

What else do teams monitor? “If you give me an hour, I can go through the whole list,” he said. An abbreviated catalogue includes: speed, hydration, sleep, travel, hormone levels, muscle fatigue, exertion, vitamin D levels, stress.

The resulting information can by used by front offices when evaluating contracts and potential trades, and also by coaches and athletic trainers when deciding how hard to push players in practices and games. It’s not just the NBA. Sports scientists and data analysts are being used in professional baseball, the NFL, NHL and MLS and by a growing number of college teams to manage, anticipate and prevent injuries.

Many sports stadiums and arenas are equipped with motion-sensor cameras, players are wired with GPS tracking devices and many are wearing sensors on the practice field that measure every minuscule body movement. In the NFL, players this season will wear a GPS tracking chip in their shoulder pads during games, but the most detailed and useful data will come during practices, where many teams use the biometric sensors. Analysts then merge data recorded by the sensor with video to spit out reports that measure performance and pinpoint areas of distress and injury potential.

Unlike traditional game statistics, this information doesn’t assess execution on the field as much as effort and whether a player is performing at his or her peak. It’s something teams can measure on a minute-by-minute basis, tracking a player’s growth or regression.

Teams are hesitant to talk about how they’re using analytics and technology to manage injuries, fearful of sharing anything that might aid the competition. A half-dozen teams declined to comment on the record or make officials available for this story.

Spotting injury ‘flags’

Analysts in the field say the landscape was entirely different a decade ago, and the past two to three years especially have seen profound changes.

Brian Kopp is the North American president of Catapult, considered one of the industry leaders when it comes to merging technology and analytics. Kopp’s company signed its first NFL team three years ago. This season, it will work with 20 teams, most of those signing up in the past 1 1/2 years.

Catapult outfits players with a biometric device that uses several tools, including an accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer. In all, the data measure every movement — every turn of the shoulder and twist of the hip, every jump, sprint or even subtle lean in any direction. The information is sent in real time to a laptop, often on the sidelines, which can compute all the data into a single metric, which Catapult calls “player load” — “which is our way of saying how hard is your body going?” Kopp explained.

Coaches and athletic trainers use this information in different ways. Kopp’s company works with NBA, NFL, NHL and MLS teams and says many monitor the player load of their athletes throughout each practice. If a player’s number extends outside a certain range, athletic trainers and coaches can respond immediately: have a player take a break and hydrate, for example, or maybe push the player even harder. One NFL team that was particularly committed to the data saw its number of players on injured reserve with soft-tissue injuries drop from 16 in 2013 to just three last season, said Kopp, declining to name the team.

“If you think about it, hamstrings, groins — these are soft-tissue injuries based on overuse and overwork,” he explained. “Without this information, you don’t know what happens until it happens. Now we’re able to identify some of the flags a bit earlier.”

All of this information can be used by training staffs and coaches.

For example, the Toronto Raptors recently scrutinized data that tracked their players’ precise movements and realized that they moved forward in a straight-ahead fashion (think of a clock face: between 11 and 1 o’clock) only 15 percent of the time. The other 85 percent of the movements were sideways, diagonal or backward. That information could change a team’s conditioning habits, devaluing a traditional exercise such as wind sprints and encouraging teams to mix in others that better mimic game movements.

A variety of factors

There have even been efforts to use all of this data to peek into the future. The thinking goes, if a team can anticipate an injury, it can avoid the injury. By combining a variety of metrics and risk factors, David Tenney, the sports science and performance manager for MLS’s Seattle Sounders, feels his team has a strong understanding of probabilities. For example, he says the two biggest risk factors for injury are a previous injury and a player’s age.

“So you build those two things into your model right away,” he said. “And then you have things like, what are their work habits like out of season? That’s extremely predictive. If we know a guy has a previous muscle injury, he’s over the age of 30 and we know he wasn’t fully compliant in the offseason, we know that player is pretty much guaranteed to have an injury the next year. Most of our data shows he’s almost 100 percent going to have an injury.”

Tenney warns there are a variety of considerations — sleep, nutrition, travel, playing surface, workload — and a key is learning how these factors interact, and also how their impact varies from player to player.

In 2013, the Sounders relied on a model that attempted to take all these factors into account and peg an exact injury probability to every player. Tenney knew, for example, a high-risk player might have been 25 percent likely to suffer an injury. Others might be just 5 percent. He said the season largely played out according to the model, but the team decided to scrap the predictive numbers and now focuses more on identifying and minimizing the risk factors and red flags that it knows can lead to injuries.

“Using analytics to predict injuries, it has to come down to understanding the interactions of everything,” Tenney said. “There’s never one cause for injuries. There’s never one single metric that’s going to be predictive of an injury.”

Because the undertaking requires unique software, expensive technology and lots of man hours, many teams contract with outside companies rather than attempt to assemble and analyze all of the data in-house.

Kitman Labs is an Ireland-based company that broke into the field working primarily with rugby and soccer teams. It expanded to the United States last year and is working with the Tampa Bay Rays and Los Angeles Dodgers this season and recently signed on with the Miami Dolphins. It sells clients on the idea that its analysts can keep more players on the field from week to week.

Stephen Smith, the company’s co-founder, points to January’s AFC playoffs for an example. When the Baltimore Ravens met the New England Patriots, 19 of Baltimore’s players were on injured reserve, including four starters and three rookie draft picks.

“Surely if they had more of those players available, they would have won that game,” he said. “If they won that game, could they have won the Super Bowl? I think the answer is yes. . . . Sometimes the margins are that small where one or two players can help you win games.”

Player backlash coming?

While the early reviews for Kitman Labs have been positive, this new technology and data crunching is akin to an arms race, and Leslie Saxon, the executive director of the USC Center for Body Computing, warns that some upstart companies are overpromising what they can deliver. Much of the rapidly escalating data and technology haven’t necessarily been tested, vetted and proven, she said.

“We’re seeing a lot of haphazard science that will end up in the closet,” she said.

Saxon is also worried about how the data will be used down the road and who has access to it all. She’s in favor of new information if it helps improve performance, but not if it is used against players.

“Until leagues, teams and players get together and develop governance around this data that’s in best interest of the player, it won’t move forward,” she said. “At some point, there will be a backlash. The first guy who gets cut or who suddenly appears to be damaged goods is the first time guys will start ripping these off their bodies.”

The collective bargaining agreements between pro leagues and players’ unions largely limit teams from mandatory monitoring of medical minutiae, particularly during games. Both unions and leagues are wrestling with defining the gray area between what’s considered performance data and what is health data.

“I think everyone is paying close attention to this,” said Tara Greco, the NBA Players Association spokeswoman.

While leagues and unions search for a comfortable level of trust, teams in all major sports — including many top-tier college programs, which aren’t restricted by CBAs — will continue to look for an edge, figuring that the healthiest team each year might also be the most successful.

“Anything that can help prevent injuries, teams right now are trying to implement,” Rogowski said.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/moneyball-20-keeping-players-healthy/2015/08/24/5011ac54-48e6-11e5-9f53-d1e3ddfd0cda_story.html

 

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Rogowski named NBA’s director of sports medicine and research

Coming off a season in which star after star was lost to serious injury, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and NBA Players’ Association executive director Michele Roberts have made player health one of the top priorities to address this offseason.

With that in mind, the union hired Joe Rogowski, a former athletic trainer and strength and conditioning coach with the Orlando Magic and the Houston Rockets, as the director of sports medicine and research. The certified athletic trainer with a master’s degree in exercise physiology from Central Florida is tasked with developing programs and coordinating best practices to try to limit the number of games lost to injury.

About six weeks after taking the position, Rogowski spoke with The AP about making the transition from hands-on work with 15 players to helping an entire league. Some highlights from the conversation:

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AP: How did things get started with the union?

Rogowski: It was a very intriguing opportunity in the sense that they’ve never had this position before. It’s sort of an open canvas for me. I can develop ideas. One of the things they liked is I’ve been in the trenches for the last 10 years in the NBA as an athletic trainer and a strength and conditioning coach. So I’ve seen a lot from the perspective of the players and the teams. I’ve brought that unique perspective to the union. I can help communicate to them what’s going on behind the scenes from my perspective. I think that intrigued them.

AP: Looking at the injuries from last season, is it a coincidence or do you see some patterns developing that have led to more players getting hurt?

Rogowski: I don’t think that’s anything we can make a conclusive argument now. That’s definitely something we’re looking into an analyzing. I think it’s still too early to say this is why these injuries are happening. But we are doing our due diligence. There are so many variables that are involved with injuries. So being able to look at all the different variables and not just one thing is very important. And keeping an open mind is very important.

AP: Are you going to be working with individual team training staffs?

Rogowski: That’s one of the real positives about myself in this position is the fact that I have good relationships with the teams because of my 10 years of experience in the NBA. The communication factor, which is a huge component of sports medicine and the strength and conditioning side. Being able to talk with the team’s trainer and the strength and conditioning coaches, doctors, communicate with the union what’s going on and the player what’s going on. Sometimes it’s as simple as a miscommunication. A lot of the issues can be easily resolved with communication between the sides because they just don’t understand sometimes.

AP: Commissioner Silver has said he would like training staffs to share best practices. Some teams view those as proprietary information. How can you help facilitate more collaboration?

Rogowski: Some teams do see it as an advantage, but a lot of times when you explain it in a way they understand, you can make them aware that this is not any type of advantage you’re giving away. You’re just helping increase knowledge. Now what they have specifically on their guys, they can keep to themselves. But if it’s a general concept on addressing injuries, I don’t think any teams or trainers will hold on to that. If the NBA as a whole is a better product and you have fewer injured guys, it’s great for everybody.

AP: How much will the new schedule and fewer back-to-backs and four-in-five nights help?

Rogowski: As far as if it will make a big impact, I’m in a wait-and-see mode. I definitely think it’s a step in the right direction. I definitely am in favor of it. But we’ll see. Time will tell. Do we still need to keep going in that direction? Yes. Are there other avenues we need to address and look into? Absolutely. Having gone through it myself, I would definitely like that. And I know the players are in favor of it.

AP: How do the retired players factor in?

Rogowski: That’s one of the areas I’m really excited about. I’ve had so many players throughout the years that have gone into retirement. I’ve seen some of their struggles. And not even struggles, but ways we could pay them back for all their years of service. Starting programs for them has been one of my passions. That’s one of the things I went to Michele and Roger and set as one of the priorities, setting up medical programs for them and making sure once they’re done playing, they’re not just forgotten about. They’re still a focus for us, whether it’s orthopedics, cardiology, endocrinology; whatever it is, we’re setting up stuff for them to still be healthy after they’re done playing.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
http://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/meet-nba-players-associations-sports-science-guru-33188254