How the Calendar Manufactures Fatigue
A long regular season compressed into roughly half a calendar year produces a workload pattern that no other part of an athlete's year resembles. Games arrive in clusters, sometimes on consecutive nights, and the travel between them crosses time zones in both directions. Basketball itself is a repeated-sprint sport built on decelerations, changes of direction and jumping, which loads muscles and tendons far more than the running distance alone suggests.
The part that matters most is sleep. A night game followed by a flight means a compressed recovery window at exactly the point when recovery has the most work to do, and sleep debt does not clear on the same timescale it accrues. Fatigue therefore behaves cumulatively and with a lag. A player can feel acceptable through a dense stretch and carry the residue of it for weeks afterwards, which is why fatigue management is planned against the calendar rather than negotiated on the day based on how somebody reports feeling.
