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Want a professional athlete to grind through an interminable regular-season schedule, then embark on an even more grueling postseason march? No problem. But when players start participating
in events outside of that familiar cycle — such as when NBA stars head to the Olympics — concern starts to build about wear and tear. Even putting aside injuries that happen during
extracurricular play, it’s not unreasonable to expect that tired stars would be predisposed toward injury and underperformance upon rejoining their teams for the ensuing season.
According to the numbers, however, there’s not really any reason to worry about Dream Teamers coming home from Rio in a weakened state. If anything, playing for Team USA at a big
international tournament seems to be associated with a boost in performance the next season.
This isn’t to say that playing in the Olympics or FIBA Worlds caused those players to create more wins. (Although plenty of young players do credit the international experience with
improving their skills.) It may also be a case of coincidence over causality — perhaps USA Basketball tends to select players who are particularly primed for improvement; or who feel they
have few enough nagging injuries to participate, implying they’re overall healthier than the average player; or maybe the standard aging curve of our projections doesn’t perfectly apply to
the kinds of transcendent players who are usually tabbed for the Dream Team.
But it does provide decent proof that declines in production aren’t traditionally associated with the extra pounding of an event such as the Olympics. For most players, the international
stage is a springboard to bigger and better things, not a career-hampering pitfall.
CORRECTION (Aug. 16, 5:05 p.m.): An earlier version of the chart in this article misidentified the year in which Kevin Garnett competed in the Olympics. It was 2000, not 2008.
I did this using a method spun off from the technique Nate Silver and I used to estimate Tiger Woods’s major-winning pace in golf. For each age, I ran a regression predicting a player’s
final, end-of-career WAR total (zeroing out negative-WAR seasons) based on his career sum to date. A player’s projected WAR the following season, then, is the number of WAR he’d have to
produce that year in order to be on pace for the same final, end-of-career WAR after the season that he was before the year began.
Excluding rookies such as Christian Laettner in 1992 and Anthony Davis in 2012.
Neil Paine was the acting sports editor at FiveThirtyEight. @Neil_Paine