Napping on Game Day Is Prevalent Among N.B.A. Players

By Jonathan Abrams, The New York Times, 3/7

The All-Star guard is 37 and knows that decline may come fast at his age. But his solution is not to increase his conditioning or to lift more weights. Instead, he plans to increase his naptime, seizing on an element of N.B.A. life as common as a 3-point shot.

“If you nap every game day, all those hours add up and it allows you to get through the season better,” Nash said. “I want to improve at that, so by the end of the year, I feel better.”

Nash is among a great majority of N.B.A. players who swear by their pregame nap. Most are interested in its restorative benefits, although a few may just be trying to counter boredom. Whatever the reason, balls stop bouncing and shoes stop screeching every afternoon.

“Everyone in the league office knows not to call players at 3 p.m.,” said Adam Silver, the league’s deputy commissioner. “It’s the player nap.”

In the , napping is often stigmatized, seen as evidence of laziness or a lack of purpose. But in the world of sports, and certainly in the N.B.A., the attitude is entirely different.

“You’re nocturnal in terms of what you do, playing at night, so your body adjusts to the rhythm of being up late, getting in early in the morning,” said Grant Hill, Nash’s teammate with the . “You’re tired around midday. Naps are important. It refreshes you. It gets you ready for competition.”

N.B.A. players appear to be the kings of nap, although professional hockey players seem right behind. Of the roughly two dozen N.B.A. players interviewed for this article, all said that they usually took naps in the hours before games.

N.F.L. players are least likely to nap because they play only once a week, usually during the day, and much of their work schedule, revolving around team meetings and practices, resembles that of a traditional 9-to-5 worker.

In baseball, major leaguers have less disruptive lives on the road than N.B.A. players because they almost always spend several days in one city before moving on. They also do not have to deal with morning practices, making it fairly easy to sleep in.

Still, some baseball players nap in the clubhouse. A mild controversy erupted last season when several Seattle Mariners told a newspaper reporter that Ken Griffey Jr. was asleep in the clubhouse during a game.

Harold Reynolds, an MLB Network analyst and a former player, recalled that at his first All-Star Game, in 1987, no one could find Rickey Henderson for a meeting. He was eventually discovered asleep, taking his usual power snooze.

1 / 4 Napping on Game Day Is Prevalent Among N.B.A. Players

N.H.L. schedules closely resemble those in the N.B.A., which is why naps are prevalent there, too. Players work late, quickly move on to another city and often have morning skates to prepare for games. Sleep is disrupted. So players shut down in the afternoon for 20 minutes to two or three hours.

“There are not too many times when I don’t sleep,” Devils forward Patrik Elias said. “Even if it’s just for a bit, it’s something I do.”

Elias, 34, said his naps typically lasted 90 minutes, sometimes two hours. Asked if every hockey player napped in the afternoon, he said: “I don’t know if everybody does, but I do. Everybody wonders how you can just shut it off in the middle of the day, but it’s a routine, and you get used to it. You do want to relax and get some strength.”

In the N.B.A., LeBron James swears by his siesta. Derrick Rose sleeps three hours before every night game. checks into a hotel before home games for his pregame nap.

Some N.B.A. teams have received an education in the art of napping from Dr. Charles Czeisler, the director of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of the sleep medicine division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Czeisler, known in the N.B.A. as the sleep doctor, has consulted with the , the Portland Trail Blazers and the about the virtues of receiving enough sleep. Napping was a significant piece of the tutorial.

Czeisler said he thought that N.B.A. players needed more sleep than the average person, about nine hours a day. Typical N.B.A. games end about 10 p.m., and with showering, eating, interviews and unwinding factored in, many players do not get to sleep until much later. If they are traveling to the next city after a game, they may arrive at their hotels after 3 a.m. There may then be a morning shootaround that requires getting up by 9 a.m. or earlier. Who wouldn’t want a nap?

Several N.B.A. teams have experimented with curtailing morning shootarounds to establish a more reliable sleep pattern for players. But for the most part, shootarounds remain an N.B.A. staple. And every player seems to nap.

“That’s probably the most consistent sleep that you get, based on travel and game schedule,” said Jason Kapono of the .

Czeisler said that players who got nine hours of sleep were more likely to react quicker, remember plays better and generally maintain their health more consistently. He said that biologically, the body rests best at night or in the midafternoon, enhancing the value of a nap.

“Sleep is critical to maintaining performance, particularly reaction time,” he said.

One N.B.A. trainer, Gregg Farnam of the Timberwolves, said he contacted Czeisler because of

2 / 4 Napping on Game Day Is Prevalent Among N.B.A. Players

his team’s relatively young roster.

Czeisler met personally with the team and offered his thoughts. Players not in the league long enough to believe in the value of naps began to change their view.

“Guys make more time for naps now,” Farnam said. “Before, they’d just take a nap when they were really tired instead of building it into” their routine.

There are routines for before and after naps. Tyson Chandler of the gets a massage, Ronny Turiaf of the Knicks seeks bread pudding and Antawn Jamison of the carefully irons and lays out his clothes before shutting it down.

When Raja Bell of the wakes up, he drinks coffee to try to bypass the drowsy feeling some feel right after waking up. (After talking extensively about naps for this article, he said, he had trouble napping the next day.) of the said he once tried to bypass his pregame nap out of curiosity to see what would happen. He found himself out of rhythm on the court.

“When you wake up from a nap, you know what time it is, you know it’s time to get ready and get focused and go to the game,” Curry said.

As a player, Coach George Karl napped, a ritual he passed on to his team. But Ben Gordon of the Detroit Pistons said that when he played in Chicago, one of his coaches, Scott Skiles, once admonished the team to limit naps after he found his players slogging through a practice.

“He was saying the naps should only be 45 minutes or an hour long and maybe guys were sleeping too long,” Gordon said.

Some enter the league with a better understanding of sleep science than others. While at Stanford, Landry Fields, the Knicks rookie, participated in a sleep study under Cheri Mah, a researcher at the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Laboratory.

Fields wore a watch — “kind of like a mini-seismograph,” he said — that charted how much sleep he got each night.

Mah, who said she had also consulted with N.B.A., N.H.L., college teams and Olympians, said sports teams had started paying attention to the topic more in the last two years. She said athletes, in particular, were susceptible to sleep debt: an hour less of sleep a night here and there quickly accumulates.

“Many athletes have optimized physical training and recovering, and nutrition plays a large role,” Mah said. “There really hasn’t been the same emphasis on optimizing sleep and recovery.”

Of course, beyond all its physical benefits, a nap also offers the simple satisfaction of taking a break from the day. You don’t have to play to be tempted.

3 / 4 Napping on Game Day Is Prevalent Among N.B.A. Players

“If you were in the corporate world, you’d love to take a nap,” the 76ers’ Kapono said. “So why wouldn’t you, if you could?”

Dave Caldwell contributed reporting.

4 / 4