Nets star Ben Simmons said he feels “great” after injury bouts with both his lower back and his left knee/calf, but head coach Jacque Vaughn said the team will continue to be cautious — within reason — with Simmons’ workload.
Simmons returned to the lineup last Friday after missing 12 days with a left lateral calf strain. He’s appeared in 19 of the Nets’ 29 games, missing time due to the calf, knee swelling and early maintenance of his lower back after undergoing a microdiscectomy this offseason.
Simmons’ nagging injuries, however, have been onset by an overload of minutes and games. The calf issues arose in the middle of the second game of a back-to-back, when Simmons asked to be pulled out of a game against the Orlando Magic at the top of the second quarter.
Simmons also missed a week-and-a-half of action with knee swelling after playing in both games of a back-to-back in later October. His knee eventually had fluid drained.
Vaughn said the goal is for “all our guys to be playing in all of the games,” and that includes Simmons, even if his start to year one in Brooklyn has been tattered by injury. Vaughn also noted, however, that the easing of the schedule in the second leg of the season has given the Nets more breathing room — particularly more time for rest and recovery for a team whose legs were tested early.
Brooklyn’s front-heavy start to the season included seven sets of back-to-back games through Dec. 10. Only one team has played more back-to-backs — the Utah Jazz — with the Detroit Pistons as the lone team tying the Nets’ mark.
The Nets now ostensibly have more off days than they know what to do with. They’ve had more consecutive days off in the last week — with two more off days between Sunday’s matchup in Detroit and Wednesday’s showdown with the Golden State Warriors — than it feels like they’ve had all season.
The lighter schedule informs their decision-making with Simmons, though Simmons suggested his voice isn’t as prominent in whether or not he’ll play extended minutes as Vaughn’s or the performance team’s input.
“I’m not a doctor bro, like, I don’t make that decision,” Simmons said after a rare Nets practice on Thursday before the team caught a plane to Toronto for Friday’s matchup against the Raptors. “I can only tell them how I feel, but at the same time I’m gonna trust their decision and what they think is best for me.”
Simmons said it’s difficult as a premier NBA player to have to play on a minutes limit.
“It’s tough, because once I’m out there, I want to stay out there,” he said. “But we’re, playing for the long term, you know? We want to get to the playoffs healthy and do the right thing.”
Vaughn hasn’t yet set a minutes limit for Simmons on Friday. He said the plan has been to build on minutes for both Simmons and TJ Warren — who is playing after missing two seasons with stress fractures in his left foot — but “not to the point where” their minutes are overloaded.
“We want both those guys to be healthy at the end of the year,” Vaughn said. “So we’ve got to be smart about how we use those minutes going forward, whether that’s back to backs, how we use those minutes, whether that is how many minutes they play in a single game. I think we have enough depth to use their minutes judiciously and to be able to play at a pace that we want to and still play hard.”
The Nets have also saved mileage by scrapping game day morning shootarounds, which is uncommon because of the truncated nature of the NBA schedule. On recent game days at Barclays Center, the Nets have cleared the court two-and-a-half hours before tipoff to go through a light walkthrough.
Some of their practice time has been just as light. The Nets didn’t practice on Wednesday, for example. Instead, they held what Vaughn described as a “get what you need” day.
For Simmons, that meant a day of getting treatment on his knee and lower back. For Nic Claxton, that meant coming into the practice gym and working on free throws.
On Thursday, however, Vaughn said the Nets tinkered with different ways to use Simmons on the offensive end. Simmons’ unique profile — a 6-10 forward with guard skills and elite athleticism — provides a challenge for the coaching staff: What lineup combinations best maximize his skill set? How often is he on the ball in those different lineups?
“Who are you going to have out there on the floor with him? What is the spacing going to look like? What’s he’s going to look like with the basketball in his hands [versus] where he’s going to be without the basketball in his hands?” Vaughn said. “So we’re always trying to put him in a position to succeed. And we’re still messing around with that, where he’s at. We worked on that today with him with the ball [and] without the ball.”
The Nets have enough data. They know too many games in rapid succession with high minute totals is a recipe for a cooked Simmons. If the Nets have any hope of winning the championship that’s evaded them since Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving signed in Brooklyn, a healthy Simmons will be crucial.
The Nets, of course, have to balance preserving Simmons for the end of the season against playing him enough minutes to know how to best use him.
“There’s a lot that goes into it because the player wants to play minutes, also. So you have this honest conversation of what’s too much,” Vaughn said. “I think at the beginning, we wanted to continue to push Ben to play as many games as possible and for him to grow with the group on the floor. I think we learned maybe we pushed a little bit too much for a guy that hadn’t played in a long time. And so I think sometimes you kind of learn by going through the situation and we’re smarter on the other side hopefully.”
As for back-to-backs, the Nets don’t have another one until Jan. 19.
