Yahoo Movies Why Did the Boston Celtics Lose? Maybe It’s Jet Lag, Scientists Say.
Editor’s note: The Golden State Warriors won Game 6 of the NBA Finals to clinch another championship. Below is the original story published June 16.
At the time this story is published, the Boston Celtics are down 2-3 in a best-of-seven-games series against the Golden States Warriors in the NBA Finals. People have been pointing to a lot of reasons why this might be the case, including: the Celtics are too tired after being pushed to the brink of elimination by the Milwaukee Bucks and Miami Heat; Marcus Smart is getting into too much foul trouble; Steph Curry is maybe a god; the Warriors have figured out some kind of third-quarter magical spell; and so forth.
No matter the reason, the consensus among the league is that the Celtics are poised to lose Game 6 tonight and the Warriors are about to clinch their fourth championship since 2015.
Not that Celtics fans need another reason to complain, but their team might have been disadvantaged from the outset—just by sheer geography. On Thursday, a group of Australian researchers published a new study in Frontiers in Physiology on the effect of jet lag on NBA performance, with the implication that this is the reason the Boston Celtics might be playing worse than the Warriors.
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Why? It’s simple: You lose time when you travel eastward. So for teams located on the East Coast, they have less time to recover in order to play home games—virtually negating the supposed advantages of playing on one’s home court.
“Eastward travel—where the destination time is later than the origin time—requires the athlete to shorten their day,” Elise Facer-Childs, a researcher at Monash University in Melbourne and a lead author of the new study, said in a press release. “Athletes often struggle to fall asleep at an earlier bedtime, leading to sleep loss and, consequently, potential impaired physiological performance and motivation the next day.”
The researchers pulled together data from the 10 regular seasons stretching from 2011 to 2021. What they found was that jet lag caused by eastward travel was associated with worse game performance for teams returning to play home games, including a roughly 6 percent reduced chance of winning, a reduced point differential (the gap between points scored and points allowed) of 1.29 points, and a reduced rebound differential of 1.29 rebounds. Performance for these teams only got worse as the number of time zones traveled eastward increased.
Moreover, westward jet lag did not produce the same effects for teams going back west to home, presumably since they gained hours as part of the journey. Nor did western teams suffer the same degree of impaired performance when they traveled east for away games.
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The researchers ultimately suggest the NBA should figure out a new strategy for scheduling games to mitigate these effects and give Eastern Conference teams more time to recover from travel. If that’s not possible, then teams may need to figure out their own ways to limit the stress of jet lag their players experience.
Granted, the new study did not include data from the player performance in the playoffs, and the researchers acknowledge that the high stakes of the playoffs means teams might already be implementing strict preparation to give players a chance to recover.
Still, the new study is sure to inflame the debate about why there’s been such an imbalance in power between the Eastern and Western Conferences in the NBA. If you see Boston playing poorly tonight and you refuse to believe it’s because the Warriors are simply the better team, you can now tell all your friends it’s the jet lag. (Surely, as is normal in sports discourse, they’ll hear you out calmly and with an open mind.)
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