Sidney Crosby, Team Canada’s captain at the 4 Nations Face-Off, is an example of a veteran who knows how to manage his output over the course of a long season.Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images
A seminal achievement in Canadian sports history may have hinged on a particular Toronto Raptors approach to training and therapy leading up to the 2019 NBA Finals.
Back then, the Golden State Warriors were at the height of their dynastic powers, but a run of three NBA titles in four years and five consecutive finals appearances put tremendous strain on the team’s star players. The upstart Raptors did not have the championship pedigree. What Canada’s lone NBA team did have was a fresh approach to managing the physical stress on its best player, Kawhi Leonard.
“Load management” has become a catchphrase to describe how the Raptors dealt with the strain on Leonard’s body, after he had missed most of the previous season in San Antonio. He was kept out of 25 of Toronto’s 82 regular-season matches in the 2019 season, but he played every playoff game in leading the team to the NBA Championship.
“The best prepared teams have the most success,” says Derrell Levy, founder of Intech, an athlete training centre in Vaughan, Ont., whose clients range from NHL hockey players to the country’s top high-school footballers.
“Fans may not like it, but (load management) works.”
For Matt Nichol, who founded BioSteel, a sports drink, and now works in player health and high-performance roles with the Ottawa Senators and Hamilton Tiger-Cats, among others, his industry is about evolution.
“It’s up to people like me to figure out how to (exploit) that 1 per cent,” Nichol says of the fine margins created by tweaking and revolutionizing training programs, “and for guys like Connor McDavid to use it (to their advantage).”
With the 4 Nations Face-Off and NHL players returning to the Olympics for the first time in 12 years in 2026, McDavid could play another 100 games this season and next. The Edmonton Oilers star played 101 in 2023-24 in leading his team to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final.
Basketball has the NBA Cup on top of the regular schedule and playoffs. The NFL now has a 17th regular season game and an extra round of post-season competition. In European soccer, the Champions League takes place parallel to regular club competition. There are times when it feels like one cannibalizes the other because of the demands it puts on some of Europe’s big clubs and their top players.
In response, teams now design and monitor everything from sleep patterns to nutrition to detailed biometrics to try to keep athletes healthy and in their lineups.
“You have to remember that you’re talking about athletes with remarkable God-given ability to start with,” says Ilan Cumberbirch, founder of Yard Athletics in Vancouver.
The new reality has forced teams to be very specific about how athletes prepare. For Cumberbirch, it’s about balancing what made an extraordinarily gifted player good in the first place, and building off it.
“Tech can pick up on an asymmetric reading,” Cumberbirch says of tracking tools now common in all sports. “But you also have to be careful … making a change because of (conflicting) data points, ultimately you could be doing a disservice.”
Cumberbirch gives an example of a veteran NHL player who, due to a variety of factors, may be showing data in training that suggests a drop off in output and a need to do things differently.
Not so fast, Cumberbirch says. The player may simply be managing his output to preserve himself for game days. “He could be just producing that feedback because he’s good at (training), and he should keep it going.”
Nichol says it is always about being smart with practice and preparation, and not going all-out when that effort isn’t needed. “It’s great to skate fast, but (it’s really about) skating fastest in the context of a game, where your opponent is trying to knock your block off.”
In-season training offers more nuance and complications, where athletes want to push themselves to improve, but only to a point. “To get most of the limited fuel you have in the tank,” Nichol says.
Levy paints a scenario of in-season programs and the data collection to support them. “We can see when players go into the red zone,” he says, referring to how athletes push the limits. “Go into the red zone (too much) and those are the guys that (tend to) get sick.”
Speaking around the time there was uncertainty surrounding Sidney Crosby’s participation in the 4 Nations, Cumberbirch says traditional, human elements still prevail no matter how much they may conflict with a cutting-edge approach.
“If Sid wants to play and is able to, he’s going to find a way to play, no one is going to stop him,” Cumberbirch says.
Effective training by the 20-year NHL veteran could have been the reason Team Canada’s captain made it back from injury as quickly as he did.