Myers credits the training staff led by Johan Wong and director of athletic performance Keke Lyles and the coaching staff led by Steve Kerr, who rested Curry for 20 fourth quarters when he could have played him more to boost his numbers. In turn, the coaches and trainers credit Myers and ownership for building the roster with the right bodies.
"Well, there's luck," Myers said. "We've had bad luck, too. Two years ago, David [Lee] was out against the Spurs and the Nuggets. Last year, we had no center against the Clippers. So you're in it and you're going to have years when you suffer injuries. And you're going to have years where you stay healthy."
This is Myers trying to deflect credit. But it's no coincidence that the Warriors were the healthiest team.
Golden State holds a competitive advantage. Its secret? The Warriors are based in the Bay Area, the same place where Silicon Valley calls home.
Technology and data analysis are pillars of the Warriors' front office and they make it a point to immerse the numbers and hoops together. For example: the team's stats guy, Sammy Gelfand, rebounds for the players every day rather than getting holed up in a remote office like other teams' analytical gurus.
They're as nerdy as it gets. As clients of wearable technology provider Catapult Sports, the Warriors monitor their players' workloads in practice with GPS monitors and analyze the data with acute attention to maximizing performance while minimizing injury risk.
The latest project: With the training staff, Gelfand and the team's data programmers, the Warriors are engineering a "readiness" rating for each player built on a 0-to-100 scale where 100 is prime shape and 0 is completely burnt out.
The idea is to give Kerr a handy all-in-one metric that aggregates various health indicators, including a daily five-question survey given to the players to help assess their soreness. Simple questions like, "How do you feel?" and "What's your mood?" and "How'd you sleep?" Each question has multiple phrases that the players choose from. Each answer corresponds to a number on a five-point scale. The lower the number, the lower the stress levels.
"It's research," Lyles says of the survey. "The wording in the answers are specific so it gives guys a good guide. Each guy is very individual. I may ask you the same questions. We want a low score. The best score you can have is a five. So let's say your average is an 11, that's your norm after months of doing it. It's 5 to 25. One point for each question.
"You come in, now you have two days that are 18 and 19. Alright, now that's a trigger. He's normally an 11, let's check in. If it's sleep, we'll look at the questions that are bad. We'll look at the travel."
The Warriors noticed that player stress was linked to lack of sleep. So they rescheduled their flights to the day after, not the night of games, so they could sleep in and get a full night's rest.
With the subjective side taken care of, the team then tackles the objective portion. They look at SportVU player-tracking data (for game workloads), Catapult data (for practice workloads) and OmegaWave heart variability data to test neurological stress. With those four inputs, the Warriors have a dashboard to whether a player should give it a go and for how long.
And the players bought in early.
"Really, if you're fatigued or sore, no one wants to feel like crap," Lyles said. "They want to feel better just as much as we want them to feel better. It's not like a head game."
The dashboard was screaming in early March. The indicators told Kerr that the core players were exhausted and red-lining to dangerous levels. So he decided to rest Curry, Thompson, Iguodala and Bogut against the Denver Nuggets on March 17.
Kerr understood fans' complaints that they wanted to see Curry and company in action.
"But I can't base my team's welfare on that," Kerr told reporters after the game in March.
The Warriors hope to aggregate all the fancy data and have the readiness rating completed for the start of next training camp. They continue to tinker with the algorithm to help predict injuries.
"I can't guarantee that'll make them better," Lyles says. "But I will say this: better conditioned guys get injured less, guys who get injured less tend to play more, guys who play more tend to make more money and have longer careers."
