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Comment by jberryman | Hacker News Reader

I've always been curious about basketball. It seems to have the same dynamic as big group races, where people are just trying to keep pace with each other until a final sprint. Yet basketball isn't very physically taxing, compared to those types of racing sports (or soccer, etc); it seems like teams could go all out the whole game, and then you wouldn't see as many games won by single digit point margins

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Basketball teams play 82 games over about 180 days, so it's a game roughly every 2.5 days not including practice - compared to 38 games over 10 months for the English Premier League which is a game every 7-8 days. I don't know how often racing teams compete but I'm assuming it isn't as frequent. Even a few days makes a large difference for rest and recovery.

Playing at 100% every game would very quickly lead to burnout and injuries, or at least that's the common wisdom. Not sure if it's accurate [1]

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/232596711772979...

Basketball isn't physically taxing the way a marathon is, but I wouldn't say it "isn't very physically taxing". It's far more physically taxing than, say, baseball or maybe even American football. However, basketball is extremely skill-based, to the degree that extremely skilled players can sometimes defeat players with better conditioning. The very best players, like LeBron, have incredible skills combined with incredible conditioning.

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