NBA Teams Sleeping Like Champions

Previously the Sleep Education Blog reported that both the Boston Celtics and the Portland Trail Blazers have been making sleep a priority. Now it seems like sleep is catching on in the NBA.

As a result the early morning shoot-around may become a casualty of this renewed emphasis on sleep. Over the weekend sportswriter Howard Beck wrote in the New York Times:

For 38 years, the morning shoot-around has been an unquestioned staple of the N.B.A. game-day routine. It may soon be extinct, another dusty exhibit in basketball history, next to the peach basket, the two-handed set shot and John Stockton’s short shorts.

The San Antonio Spurs were the trend setters. Two years ago they stopped holding morning shoot-arounds on game days.

This season they’ve eliminated morning practices altogether. Instead they’re practicing at 4 p.m.

“The shootarounds were the beginning,” Spurs head coach Greg Popovich told the San Antonio Express-News. “The next step was actually giving them more time to get more sleep.”

The Celtics and Blazers aren’t the only teams that have noticed. The Times reports that the New York Knicks, Denver Nuggets and Washington Wizards also are experimenting with changes to their practice schedules.

The goal is to help players overcome the grueling demands of the long NBA season. Late games, early practices and jet lag can be a nightmare for sleep-deprived athletes.

“The general principle is that if you are going to prioritize anything, you should prioritize sleep,” Harvard sleep researcher and NBA consultant Dr. Charles Czeisler told the Times.

But in the NBA the bottom line is that you have to win. Principles can get tossed out the window of the team bus if they don’t translate into victories on the court.

That may explain why sleep is the newest fad in the NBA. The sleeping teams have been winning. So other teams are starting to follow their game plan.

The Spurs have won three out of the last seven NBA championships. The Celtics won the 2008 NBA Title and have a 21-5 record so far this season. And last year the Blazers surged to a tie for first place in their division.

As sleep continues to help these teams win, other teams are likely to start getting more sleep. It’s the new sleep cycle in the NBA.

Learn more about how sleep improves sports performance.

Image by Jack

Celtics Getting Sleep for the NBA Season

Boston Celtics head coach Doc Rivers is looking for any advantage that will help his team return to the NBA Finals this year. After winning the 2008 NBA Title, the Celtics were ousted from the 2009 playoffs by the Orlando Magic.

This season the Celtics get All-Star forward Kevin Garnett back from a knee injury. They’re also getting more sleep.

The team is being advised by Harvard sleep researcher Dr. Charles Czeisler. As a result they’re practicing at noon instead of early in the morning. And they’re no longer holding morning shootarounds on game days.

“I think they’re fresh,” Rivers told the Boston Globe. “I think we’ve had better practices.”

The goal is to help the players avoid the sleep deprivation that is rampant in the NBA. The 82-game regular season can be a brutal grind.

Play a late game; fly deep into the night to the next city on the schedule; fight off jet lag for a morning practice. Do it all over again.

As teams criss-cross the country sleep can get lost like checked luggage. That may be one reason why only seven of the 30 NBA teams had a winning record on the road last season.

“What we are trying to do is leverage the power of sleep,’’ said Czeisler. “As pro athletes, they spend so much time trying to practice and master the skills of the game - and sleep turns out to be a very critical part of the process…Teams that take advantage of this can really enhance their play.”

In January the Sleep Education Blog reported that the Portland Trail Blazers were getting help from Czeisler. They had finished the previous season with a mediocre 41-41 record.

The Blazers surged to a tie for first place in their division with a 54-28 record. The turnaround was fueled in part by a seven-game improvement in their road record.

The Celtics hope sleep will be a successful part of their gameplan this year. They’ll get their first test when they open the season against LeBron James and the Cavaliers in Cleveland on Tuesday night.

As for Czeisler, he hopes that we would all get more sleep.

“We are such a sleep-deprived society,’’ Czeisler said. “But the message is beginning to get through, that sleep is important for performance…It’s all about making sleep a priority.”

Learn more about how sleep improves sports performance.

Image by Daniel Go

NBA Finals: A West Coast Advantage for the Lakers?

Game one of the NBA Finals between the Lakers and Magic will tip off a little after 9 p.m. EDT tonight. The Lakers will have the home-court advantage in the seven-game series; a study in the journal Sleep shows that they also may have a West Coast advantage.

The study analyzed 8,495 regular-season NBA games over eight seasons. The researchers did not find that jet lag had a major influence on the outcome of games.

But then they did a sub-analysis of 101 games in which one team traveled across the country to play. In these games, the visiting team did four points better when they traveled west to east rather than east to west.

This may not sound like a big difference. But during the last season studied, there was only a 3.2-point difference between winners and losers in NBA games. Four points could change the outcome of a game.

Why did the West Coast teams have an edge? The authors propose that it has to do with the timing of the games.

Research suggests that athletic performance may peak in the late afternoon. Performance may decline at night as sleepiness increases.

When a game tips off at 9 p.m. in Orlando, the Lakers will be playing at a “body-clock time” of 6 p.m. They may be more alert than the Magic players.

So the Lakers may have a better chance of stealing a game on the road. Then again, it was the East Coast Celtics who won a road game in Los Angeles on the way to a 4-2 series win in the 2008 Finals.

The Magic players aren’t the only ones who face an uphill battle in this series; their fans will be put to the test too.

The Orlando Sentinel reports today that the late tip-off times during the playoffs are depriving Magic fans of sleep. When it comes to sleep, Lakers fans have their own West Coast advantage.

Image by Dale Chumbley

NBA Fans Can Get a Little More Sleep

Basketball fans can look forward to an earlier bedtime as they enjoy the 2009 NBA playoffs, which tip off today. But only one hour earlier…and only on Sunday nights…and only during the NBA Finals.

Earlier this season the NBA announced a slight change to the playoff schedule. Sunday night games during the Finals will begin around 8 p.m. EDT instead of 9 p.m.

First-round games in the Eastern Conference also will begin no later than 8 p.m. But East Coast fans will lose a lot of sleep trying to watch the first round of the Western Conference playoffs.

Want to see Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan or Carmelo Anthony try to lead their teams to the second round? Get ready to stay up for tip-off times as late as 10:30 p.m. EDT.

But is this season’s schedule change a sign that there will be a shift to earlier tip-offs in the coming years? Don’t count on it.

Fans of the Celtics weren’t too happy with the 9 p.m. start times during the 2008 Finals. Especially the parents of children who should have been in bed when the games were just getting started.

But NBA Commissioner David Stern made it clear: Start times will be determined by projected ratings and audience sizes…not by sleep needs.

“The ad rates only go up if the ratings go up,” Stern told a Boston sports radio station last June. “The ratings only go up if there are more people watching.”

Image by Adam Pieniazek

Sleep & Jet Lag on Day 2 of “March Madness”

How did yesterday’s jet lag-challenged teams fare on the first day of the NCAA basketball tournament?

BYU came out flat, fell behind and never caught up to Texas A&M. Cal State Northridge was the opposite. They started strong but faded late in a loss to Memphis.

As for UCLA, they’re probably relieved to have escaped with a one-point win. After crossing three time zones to play a late game, they’ll surely get some rest today on their day off.

Which teams are most likely to come out sluggish on day two of the tournament?

Utah St. gets to stay “home” in the Mountain time zone to play Marquette in Boise, Idaho. But it will be an early morning for the Aggies.

The 12:30 p.m. EDT tip-off means that the game will start at 10:30 a.m. locally. It will feel like 11:30 a.m. for sixth-seeded Marquette, which will travel from Milwaukee in the Central time zone.

Stephen F. Austin plays in the earliest game against third-seeded Syracuse. The 12:15 p.m. EDT start in Miami, Fla., will feel like 11:15 in the morning for the Lumberjacks from the state of Texas.

Oklahoma St. faces a similar challenge. The 12:25 EDT tip-off in Dayton, Ohio, will feel like 11:25 a.m. for the eighth-seeded Cowboys. Knoxville, Tenn., is in the part of the state that is in the Eastern time zone. So there will be no time change for the Volunteers.

Travelling east may be a challenge for Arizona St. Arizona does not recognize daylight saving time. So the state is currently three hours behind Eastern Daylight Time.

Temple will try to upset the sixth-seeded Sun Devils at 2:45 EDT in Miami. It will feel like an 11:45 a.m. start for Arizona St.

Cornell will take a long flight from Ithaca, N.Y., to Boise to play third-seeded Missouri. The 3 p.m. EDT start time won’t be a problem. But the long flight could take a toll on the players.

Fifth-seeded Florida St. also had to make the long trip to Boise to play Wisconsin. In addition to the flight, the Seminoles will have to deal with an unusual 9:55 p.m. EDT tip-off.

In the end, sleep can be a challenge for players on every team. The excitement and pressure of the tournament can lead to sleepless nights. The Herald Journal described how the Utah St. players struggled to sleep during their conference tournament.

And players aren’t the only ones fighting sleep loss. Fans on the East Coast have to stay up late to watch all of the 10 p.m. games.

So try to get some sleep even as you enjoy the madness.

Sleep, Jet Lag and “March Madness”

The NCAA basketball tournament tips off today at 12:20 p.m. EDT. Did you finish your bracket yet?

President Obama completed his bracket early. Surprisingly, he was extremely “conservative” with his picks.

His Elite Eight includes all four of the number-one seeds and three of the number-two seeds. His only sleeper? Third-seeded Syracuse over second-seeded Oklahoma.

If you’re still finalizing your bracket, one thing to keep in mind is jet lag. Some teams have to travel a long way to play their first game.

One example is UCLA. The Bruins have to cross three time zones to play upset-minded Virginia Commonwealth in Philadelphia, Pa., tonight.

The good news for UCLA is that the game won’t start until almost 10 p.m. EDT. They’ll be playing when their body clocks are set at a West-Coast time of 7 p.m. So it will feel like a normal tip-off time for the Bruins.

It’s the earlier, 12:30 p.m. EDT start times that can be more difficult for some players. Cal State Northridge and BYU both must cross two time zones to play opening-round games today. It will feel like a 10:30 a.m. start for the players on both teams.

Cal State Northridge plays Memphis in Kansas City, Mo. BYU plays Texas A&M in Philadelphia.

But can sleep really have an effect on a basketball game?

Just ask Cheri Mah of the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Laboratory. She has studied how sleep affects players on many of the Stanford sports teams.

One study involved six players on the men’s basketball team. Performance measures such as sprint times and free-throw shooting improved after extra sleep. So did ratings of mood and alertness.

“Sleep is a significant factor in achieving peak athletic performance,” said Mah. “Athletes across all sports can greatly benefit from extra sleep and gain the additional competitive edge to perform at their highest level.”

So sleep may be one factor that adds to the madness of this year’s tournament.

White House Photo, 3/17/09, Pete Souza

Fighting Jet Lag in the NBA

Pro football players weren’t the only athletes fighting the effects of jet lag over the weekend. The Orlando Magic, Indiana Pacers and Miami Heat all played on the road against Western Conference teams on Sunday. Only the Magic won, escaping San Antonio with a 105-98 victory over the Spurs.

Jet lag is simply a part of life in the NBA. The 82-game regular season schedule forces teams to criss-cross the country on a regular basis. Players can forget what city they’re in, much less the time zone.

But at least one team is fighting back against jet lag. The Oregonian reports that the Portland Trail Blazers are taking advice from a sleep doctor. It seems to be paying off.

Last season the Blazers were 7-14 in games that were played two or more time zones away. So far this season they are 7-2 in those games. Overall the Blazers are 22-14 and in second place in the Northwest Division.

The team is changing flight and practice schedules to let players get more sleep. Players also are encouraged to maintain a consistent sleep-wake pattern.

When playing on the East Coast, the Blazers don’t try to adapt to the new time zone. Instead they keep their body clocks set to a West Coast schedule. So a player who goes to bed at 1 a.m. in Portland will stay up until 4 a.m. in Orlando.

The Blazers will apply their new sleep strategy this week during another four-game trip east. It begins this evening with a game in the Central time zone against the Bulls.

Update (1/13/09): Blazers 109, Bulls 95

Update (1/14/09): 76ers 100, Blazers 79

Update (1/16/09): Blazers 105, Nets 99

Update (1/17/09): Bobcats 102, Blazers 97