NBA: For Cavs, Warriors — and Jazz — lowering injury threshold has become a priority

The ultimate goal of any team is to be the last one standing at the finish — and it seems one of the great questions and balancing acts for every team in the National Basketball Association is how to get there without needing crutches.

After resting some of his star players during a mid-March game, Golden State coach Steve Kerr was left to deal with the heckles and angry mail from fans who had driven long distances and paid top dollar to see them play. Earlier in the year, Cleveland superstar LeBron James took more than two weeks off to recover from a number of nagging injuries.

The growing trend of sitting out games in favor of rest, at the expense of wins and entertainment value, is no doubt unseemly to many fans.

It's also good science.

As the Warriors and Cavs, who face off in the Finals beginning Thursday can attest, few things complement talent like health.

"It surprises me that it's taken them this long," said James Walker, sports sciences director at the The Orthopedic Specialty Hospital in Murray. "… When you're managing minutes and taking time off, it makes perfect sense physiologically."

To reach the precipice of basketball's pinnacle, Golden State and Cleveland dispatched their playoff foes with relative ease. Even so, both teams have logged more than 100 games dating back to the start of the eight-game preseason in October. And the miles, both on the court and off it, take their toll.

"When you want to win, you've got to sacrifice your body feeling good," James, who is making his fifth straight Finals appearance, told reporters last week. "I've been fortunate enough to play until May a lot lately the last few years, and my body has sacrificed feeling good. That's just what it's about."

Success requires pain, yes, and some planning, too. More and more, teams seem ever mindful of the stresses their multimillion-dollar investments endure.

"The league's in a great spot," Utah Jazz general manager Dennis Lindsey said. "The ball moves. Teams play hard, play hard defense. But the stop-start nature of the game and the travel is really placing a lot of stress on our players, so I think teams are trying to get more sophisticated in how to handle the players' loads."

In 2012, the San Antonio Spurs were fined $250,000 for benching healthy players. Now, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich is looked at as a shining example of long-term strategy when it comes to players' health.

"At that level, it's entertainment and ticket prices, and people get upset when Tim Duncan doesn't play," Walker said. "But the reality is, when you're pushing 40, there's no way you perform as well."

The NBA, meanwhile, is looking to help out in that department. Commissioner Adam Silver has said the league has looked at the possibility of reducing the number of preseason games, and, as early as next season, the scheduling window could be expanded slightly to reduce the number of back-to-back sets teams have to play and the number of times a team would play four games in five nights.

Even so, teams would play 16 back-to-backs in a year. Without more changes, specifically the reduction in total games, it seems regular-season benching of healthy players will continue for teams playoff bound and lottery bound alike.

In Utah, where the Jazz are retooling their young roster, the thought of playing 100-plus games in a season is still a distant dream. The path to getting there, however, includes long-term planning with regard to players' minutes.

"I just believe that's the best way to help our team," Jazz coach Quin Snyder, who limited his starters to between 30-35 minutes a game, said earlier this year. "We want guys to be fresh when the game is on the line. And you also want them to be fresh at the end of the year. And you want them to be healthy two years from now. All those minutes over a period of time add up."

At season's end, the Jazz benched forward Derrick Favors and swingman Gordon Hayward at times to avoid added risk of injury. Even so, no Jazzman logged more minutes (2,618) or miles (182 over the course of the season, according to the league's SportVU tracking numbers) than Hayward.

Still, there were times the 24-year-old might have preferred to play more.

"It's one of those things as a competitor, the game's close and you're hot; you want to stay in the game, keep it going," Hayward said during the season. "But I understand what [Snyder] is doing. We've had a talk about it. There are times he wants to keep me in, but we're also building something for the future."

afalk@sltrib.com

Twitter: @tribjazz