'The next level of training': How players are meeting the demands of the NBA's most taxing season

The 2021-22 campaign, following consecutive shortened offseasons, is the most taxing in NBA history, and nobody has been pushed harder than Jrue Holiday. The Bucks guard flew two days after Milwaukee's championship parade to the Tokyo Olympics, where less than 24 hours later he led Team USA in minutes, and not two months removed from winning the gold medal game, he reported back to NBA training camp.

As the playoffs approach, Holiday, who has twice contracted COVID-19 in the past 13 months, is playing the best basketball of his career — a testament to the investment he made into his body between seasons.

"I'll never believe guys are getting hurt more because they have a short offseason," said Mike Guevara, a Los Angeles-based performance coach who counts Holiday among a growing list of NBA clients. "That's not the case, because the guy I worked with the closest had the shortest offseason of all 456 [players], and he's fine. He's playing at an all-time level, and clearly he had the shortest offseason one could ever have.

"On the same side of that coin, I can't say Jrue's having an amazing year because of training or because of my plan. I can't do that, either," added Guevara, who collaborates with Milwaukee's training staff. "What I will say is: He barely had an offseason, and he had a strategy in place, and it seems to have worked out."

Underappreciated is the effort NBA players have made to meet the rigors of the NBA's pandemic era. Likewise, trainers for both teams and individuals are pushing the limits of what it means to be prepared.

Devin Booker and randomized skill application

Consider Devin Booker. At the start of the 2019-20 season, we wondered whether he could meaningfully contribute to winning basketball, and two seasons later, he is a top-five MVP candidate for the league's most dominant team. Lost on everyone are the years of work he put in to capitalize on this opportunity.

Cody Toppert, who has spent the past three years as an assistant coach for the University of Memphis, introduced randomized training as director of player development for the Phoenix Suns in 2018, and no one took to it better than Booker. Acquiring skills is not enough. Knowing when to execute them is as important, if not more, and that means not just practicing a skill but practicing it against every possible defensive look.

"You've got to see the situation, react and apply the skill," Toppert said. "That's the next level of training. ... It's not about how many reps have you made today; it's about how many decisions have you made today."

It is better to have seen 50,000 pick-and-rolls than 5,000, or 5,000 than 500, or 500 than 50, and so on. Some players, like 2020 Sixth Man of the Year Montrezl Harrell, who played for Toppert on the Rio Grande Valley Vipers in 2015-16, benefit from reps outside the spotlight in the G League. We saw Booker make his mistakes on the NBA level for a team with low expectations. What we did not see was the work he put into training, where he prepared himself to meet Chris Paul at his level when the Suns made a move to improve.

"The old adage is that from your first year to your second year, the game slows down," Toppert said. "The game doesn't slow down. Your ability to see a situation and react has improved, because you've seen a situation over and over. The more times you've been in a situation, the more times you've made a mistake, the more you're going to understand from that and learn not to make a mistake anymore. Every wrong decision takes you a step closer to the right solution.

"When it comes to training, can we recreate the game? If a guy is not going to get all the reps in games, can we give him reps in practice or drill work that equate to a game rep, so that I can accelerate that guy who has 50 pick-and-rolls and get him to 500 quicker?"

Mental health awareness in NBA training

Not everyone is Booker. Phoenix watched top-10 picks fail in the years before and after it drafted him. At least one of them was not mentally equipped to navigate the trial-and-error period the way Booker did. As Kevin Love, DeMar DeRozan and others opened the NBA to a conversation about mental health in recent years, so, too, have Guevara, Toppert and others incorporated a healthier mindset into their training.

"NBA players have a surprising level of insecurity about the stuff they're not good at," said Toppert, who developed an app along with Luceo Sports that, among its analytical features, allows coaches and trainers to track a player's mentality on a scale of 1-10 as it relates to effort, engagement and comprehension.

If a player who normally comes ready to work mails in a session, it could forewarn a mental health issue. And if a player regularly lacks energy, he might benefit from different drills in a different setting at a different time, alongside different people. The league can only benefit from players receiving this level of attention.

"Mental health is a much bigger conversation, but day-to-day I still think it needs to be integrated," Toppert said. "Every NBA team has to have a mental health professional, which is great, but how is that being utilized? What we started to do in Phoenix, we would ask the guy when he came into the building, 'How is your day on a scale of 1-10?' Psychoanalytic data points are subjective in nature but still hold value. If you're having a crappy day when you walk into the building, you're more likely to have a crappy practice or game. You're a human being. Knowing and understanding that can be valuable as you approach the day."

Guevara analyzes his clients' faces as soon as they enter the door and will cater individual sessions to their mindset. Shortened offseasons have forced players to choose between reducing their vacation or training time, and there is no right answer for everybody. This is layered atop the added stress of adhering to COVID-19 health and safety protocols and the mental adjustment to ever-changing environments. The reintroduction of fans almost certainly impacted lower shooting percentages to start the season, as did a new ball and new rules.

"Shooting is a skill, and the environment has a heavy influence on the skill, so if a full arena is a different environment, that's going to definitely have an impact on the skill," Guevara said. "How I execute the skill, my arousal psychologically to maintain quality technique within said skill definitely is a factor. That's not even a question. I would be willing to bet that most skill coaches and sports psychologists would agree."

An arms race in the face of rule changes

It takes work to overcome those challenges, just as it takes work to meet the physical demand of rule changes meant to limit foul-baiting. As Toppert said, "If the rules change, then the theory has to change."

"You can train yourself to become better at drawing fouls," he added. "We used to do that. We used to really do that a good amount. I've been around James Harden, and I saw what he was doing. There were a lot of times he was working on drawing fouls. He really was, and so a lot of people started to do that as well."

The quickness to get a step on a defender and the strength to withstand attempts to reroute a ball-handler are now of greater import. That benefits Guevara's clients, who have developed what he describes as "a broad kinesthetic intelligence" from randomized training in the sand, on the football field or at trampoline parks.

"When guys come this summer to train, and we know that the game is more physical, we will consider those ideas and concepts as we build those training modules out, and then also incorporate more contact, more grappling, if you will, not because that's what translates ... [but] the ability to psychologically impose your physical demand on another human does," said Guevara, who along with his wife spent the pandemic developing an app, GBG (Greatness Breeds Greatness) Hoops, which features instructional videos of his basketball-style performance training workouts and interviews with NBA coaches, nutritionists and others.

Miami Heat wing Duncan Robinson is Guevara's unsung grappling hero, and the Do It Moving Human Performance founder credited Philadelphia Sixers forward Georges Niang as another player whose work ethic is unheralded.

"You've got a guy whose nickname is The Minivan," Guevara said. "We don't need to go into why that's his nickname, but that's his nickname, and he came to me with a goal. We demolished that goal. He worked his ass off, and now he is shining as a sixth or seventh man off the bench."

Stars are not the only ones who have turned an eight-month season into a year-round grind. End-of-the-bench reserves are trying to carve out a role, and role players are trying to expand theirs. There is a balance there, and that requires constant communication between a player's performance staff and his team's.

"Sometimes if you stay solely associated with the team, they're going to really try to drive home their narrative on whatever role they see for you, but if you're trying to get outside of that role, you're trying to get around other people who can maybe allow you to stretch those limits," Toppert said. "The more time you spend with those people, it can be good, but it can be bad, too. It's important to note that sometimes guys are trying to expand their role past what their capabilities are, and then that can be counterproductive, because when you go back to the team environment, you're not willing to adhere to the role."

Jrue Holiday and the restorative value of a slow grind

As contracts have risen into the hundreds of millions of dollars, teams are going to greater lengths to protect their most valuable assets, just as players have invested more in themselves. A staggering number of stars have had prolonged absences this season. Jamal Murray is almost a year removed from ACL surgery. Zion Williamson will miss the entire season with a broken bone in his foot. Paul George returned closer to 100% than 75%. If Kevin Durant's Achilles taught us anything, it is not to rush back from injury.

"I work for Coach [Penny] Hardaway, and injuries were the thing that really cost him his career," Toppert said. "He was hurt in his prime, and he kept playing injured, so the medical wasn't as precise as it is now. These guys are massive assets to their respective organizations, and the value of them in the short-term has to be weighed against the long-term. The medical people will tell you there's been a change in terms of more soft-tissue injuries or more tendon injuries or whatever, but you could probably make an argument that the injuries have not changed much, but the return times are varied based upon the new information we have regarding how the human body works and being fully recovered from these injuries."

We have come a long way from the summer of 1985, when following a Finals appearance Larry Bird injured his back shoveling crushed rock in his mother's driveway, and then played all 100 games en route to a title.

Holiday took three weeks off after the Olympics, leaving only a month to train for this season, so Guevara made a calculation in coordination with Milwaukee's trainers to ease his client into the next regular season.

"This is something that may not be believed in or talked about or necessarily the right thing," Guevara conceded, "but we talked about Game 10, Game 15 actually being Game 1 for him from the standpoint of: Don't worry about playing 35-37 minutes a game, make sure that the body is fully recovered, make sure it's a pain-free environment, so you can kind of elongate the offseason if you have that perspective."

Holiday's approach mirrored the Bucks', as they eased into their title defense and are on the verge of entering the playoffs playing their best basketball of the season as one of the healthiest teams in the NBA.

The LeBron James industrial complex

The NBA's cultural shift to holistic wellness, like so much transformative progress in this era, has its icon.

"I'd like to really applaud the fact that LeBron James has championed himself on investing so much money into his body, whether that's through physical therapy, sports medicine, cryotherapy, training, nutrition, recovery, whatever his strategies are, he's been documented as saying he spends [$1.5 million annually] on his body," said Guevara. "What that does is open ears, eyes and minds to the fact that I don't need to wait until something bad happens to start learning that what I do off the court is really going to dictate how well I do on the court. It would be a little unjustified to the players for the fans and community of basketball not to understand that these guys are training their butts off. These guys are investing so much time off the court."

James' training-inspired longevity has had a trickle-down effect throughout the sport, and basketball is better for it. Players are entering the league more skilled, more committed to rapid improvement and better prepared to continue that progression over the course of a long career. The Most Improved Player race has never been so rich with talent, and we rarely stop to appreciate why. Welcome to basketball's next level.

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Ben Rohrbach is a staff writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach