[jberryman]

I've always been curious about basketball. It seems to have the same dynamic as big group races, where people are just trying to keep pace with each other until a final sprint. Yet basketball isn't very physically taxing, compared to those types of racing sports (or soccer, etc); it seems like teams could go all out the whole game, and then you wouldn't see as many games won by single digit point margins

[akiselev]

Basketball teams play 82 games over about 180 days, so it's a game roughly every 2.5 days not including practice - compared to 38 games over 10 months for the English Premier League which is a game every 7-8 days. I don't know how often racing teams compete but I'm assuming it isn't as frequent. Even a few days makes a large difference for rest and recovery.

Playing at 100% every game would very quickly lead to burnout and injuries, or at least that's the common wisdom. Not sure if it's accurate [1]

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/232596711772979...

[philwelch]

Basketball isn't physically taxing the way a marathon is, but I wouldn't say it "isn't very physically taxing". It's far more physically taxing than, say, baseball or maybe even American football. However, basketball is extremely skill-based, to the degree that extremely skilled players can sometimes defeat players with better conditioning. The very best players, like LeBron, have incredible skills combined with incredible conditioning.