Gary Vitti was the long-time head athletic trainer for the Lakers from 1984 to 2016.
Versatility is a treasured trait in the NBA. For the team, it’s an efficient way to turn one roster spot into several when a guy can handle multiple positions, guard a few and be counted on both for the three and the D. For the player, it can mean added minutes, contract leverage, even job security.
That’s versatility on the floor. Off the floor, however, no one in the NBA was more versatile than the teams’ athletic trainers. For decades, the so-called 15th man – after 12 players, a head coach and one assistant – handled pretty much everything else.
Ankle taper, triage director, physical therapist, equipment manager, father confessor, travel booker, and occasionally a spare traffic cone pressed into duty on the practice floor. “Depending on the drill,” said Mike Abdenour, who would jump in as needed when the Detroit Pistons were shorthanded.
Abdenour, Joe O’Toole (Atlanta), Jeff Snedeker (Milwaukee), Ed Lacerte (Boston) and Gary Vitti (L.A. Lakers) were some of the old-school trainers when the NBA – top to bottom, boardroom to locker room – was a smaller, streamlined, Mom ‘n’ Pop operation compared to today.
Now a $10 billion industry, it wasn’t so long ago that the league collectively was worth millions, players were thrilled with six-figure deals vs. nine, and good seats could be had for the price these days of a latte.
Change is inevitable, though, and arguably for the better. The world of the NBA’s athletic trainers has changed in lockstep with most other aspects of the league. The National Basketball Athletic Trainers Association (NBATA), celebrating its 50th anniversary this season, has mirrored many of the developments in size, scope and specialization.
“First of all, the number of athletic trainers has doubled,” said Kevin Johnson, Philadelphia’s head trainer who entered the league 33 years ago as sidekick to Indiana’s David Craig. “When I started, there was only one other assistant and that was with the Knicks. I was the Pacers’ first full-time assistant. They didn’t even know what my role would be.”
Just as NBA front offices no longer are just a general manager and a few scouts, and as coaching staffs have burgeoned from one or two drinking buddies for the head guy, so have trainer’s rooms gotten more crowded and more expert. Current performance and medical staffs can have a dozen or more members, from several hands-on trainers to dietitians and massage therapists.
“We want to make sure everyone is getting individualized care,” said Carlos Bustamante, an assistant with the Wizards now in his eighth season. “It’s all connected, it all matters. From the training room to the weight room to the court, it’s all connected one way or another.”
NBA athletic trainers band together
“Pat Riley had a saying: ‘12 + 2 + 1.’ Twelve players, two coaches and the trainer,” said Vitti, who was the Lakers’ head trainer from 1984 to 2016. “That was the inner sanctum. Everybody else was what he called ‘the peripheral opponent.’”
Abdenour, hired right out of college by the Pistons in 1974, remembers his early days with the team as a traveling party of 17, with an additional assistant coach beyond Vitti’s Lakers and team broadcaster George Blaha.
“We were all one-man bands at that time,” said Abdenour, whose brother Tom served 23 seasons as the Golden State Warriors’ head trainer. “Compare that to now, packing a 757 with 80 people on board just in the normal schedule of NBA operations. Unless you dipped your toe in that era, you don’t have an appreciation of how the sausage was made.”
Back in 1971, O’Toole had no conception of chartered flights, ubiquitous MRI machines or players’ individually contracted personal trainers. He was seeking a way to lighten the load of equipment and supplies he and his peers had to lug, city to city, through metropolitan airports.
“He got some trainers together to create a list, so every team would have an inventory of the supplies for every visiting locker room,” Vitti said. “They did hold meetings undercover, though, because they didn’t want the NBA to think they were organizing.”
After three years of informal gatherings, O’Toole and his colleagues came up with a constitution to establish the National Basketball Trainers Association (NBTA), its name until 2004. Those simple tape-and-ice-bucket roots, Vitti said, “morphed into more camaraderie.”
“That led to the [charitable] foundation,” Vitti said. “It led to injury surveillance – somebody would collect our injury reports and track them to see trends. If there was a rash of certain injuries, you could start talking about prevention.”
Vitti added: “Some of it was contract negotiations – not collectively, but a salary survey where you’d find out anonymously the other [trainers’] salaries. Then you had something you could go in and negotiate with.”
The association was small, reflective of the teams’ staff sizes. A few places like Detroit (with Arnie Kander) and Phoenix (Robin Pound) stood out for employing strength and conditioning coaches.
“To see it change even in the last 20 years that I’ve been here, you share the load,” said Josh Corbeil, the Pacers’ head trainer and current NBATA chairperson. “The resources are greater than they were back then. But player expectations are, too. Players have these whole teams of people around them. If we don’t provide service to them, they’re going to go get it. They’re a lot more educated about their health and what it takes to stay on the court.”
Corbeil said that the NBATA gained credibility over time with the NBA and its Board of Governors, earning it a seat at the table on a full range of issues. “We have a voice,” he said. “They consult us on policy changes and we get to affect how things are done.”
Josh Corbeil is the head athletic trainer for the Pacers and the current NBATA chairperson.
Building trust with players
Most of their time is spent out of sight, downstairs, in a room inside the locker room. Almost all practices are closed, of course, and on game nights the bench area already is clogged these days with folks wearing polo shirts and fleece pullovers.
If you hear about an NBA trainer at all, it usually is in a tangential way to update on some player’s ankle sprain or groin pull. Sometimes it’s about bigger, more persistent injuries – Grant Hill, Penny Hardaway, Greg Oden, Brandon Roy, Derrick Rose – that can cast doubts in the medical staff’s direction.
On rare occasions, though, a trainer can play a starring role. When Paul George infamously snapped his leg against the basket stanchion in Las Vegas a decade ago, it was Charlotte’s Joe Sharpe (then with OKC) who rushed to the young star’s side at the USA Basketball scrimmage.
“I tried to get up almost like in a sit-up position to look at my leg, and he pushed me back down,” George told NBA TV in 2014. “He told me ‘Everything’s going to be OK. Don’t look at it. You’re going to get through it. Just stay strong.’”
And when Magic Johnson attempted his first comeback in the 1992 preseason, it was Vitti stepping up to treat a fingernail gash on his forearm without snapping on his latex gloves. The league didn’t like it at the time – with so many unknowns about HIV/AIDS and fears of easy transmission – but it wound up adding to the discussion and changing some minds.
“Magic literally educated the entire league on HIV, from the players to the owners to the players down to the ball boys,” Vitti said. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘If I put these gloves on, I’m sending a mixed message to my players and the world. I can get this done without putting the gloves on.’”
Players are central to every facet of the athletic trainers’ jobs. And with today’s salaries, their maintenance and repair can make or break a franchise. Calling them assets or investments might strike some as callous, but that’s the reality. Focus on their health is intense.
“It’s constant communication,” said Kristin Farrell, director of manual therapy and assistant athletic trainer for Utah Jazz. “From not only the people on the healthcare side but also from the coaches and the front office. And sometimes agents.
“Every morning, as a medical staff, we meet and have a rundown on each player and their plans for the day, what they did the day before,” Farrell said. “That plan is communicated to the coaches and we talk with our players, obviously. We pull from everybody in their areas [of expertise] to make sure we’re giving the most well-rounded, holistic care to them.”
Trust is paramount, same as with ordinary citizens and their health professionals. With NBA players, it requires buy-in. It requires information, explaining a nutritional need, for instance, or a minutes limit. And it requires time, sometimes years, which can be difficult to come by when players, coaches and even trainers change teams more frequently.
“You try to keep the information current and positive when you’re talking to a player,” Abdenour said. “I would hope, with these staffs as big as they are, everybody is on the same page. If you start putting doubt into people within the organization, that’s when you have a problem.”
The good news is that players in 2024 are more informed and committed than ever.
“Ninety-nine percent of them know the work that goes into it and will do it,” the Sixers’ Johnson said, “because there’s a lot at stake. Guys don’t want their careers taken away from them. If you truly love something, you’re going to do what it takes to get back.”
The days of a coach pressuring a player to get back on the court are mostly gone, the trainers interviewed for this story agreed. Many seem to defer on such timetables to the medical team.
When analytics people got involved, when “load management” became a thing in recent seasons, it seemed the pendulum had swung too far.
“Our idea of load management,” Vitti said, “was to kick the other team’s butt for three quarters and then sit our starters from the fourth. Playing 82 games was a badge of courage.”
But Gregg Farnam, Minnesota’s longtime trainer newly appointed as vice president of medical services for the Timberwolves, noted the upside of injury and rehab data. It prompted the Bucks, for example, to shut down Giannis Antetokounmpo last spring with a calf strain rather than risk having it trigger an Achilles rupture, the way Kevin Durant’s did in 2019.
“A player’s going to play when a player’s ready,” Farnum said. “But medical analytics give you a better understanding of injuries. You want your players to be healthy for a long period of time. And we’re seeing players play longer.”
Said Corbeil: “I would hope now it’s mutual respect and an appreciation of the tools we have available to make educated decisions outside of ‘How do you feel? You can go?’ It’s harder to just blindly say, ‘We’re pushing him out there Friday no matter what.’”
Athletic trainer profession rapidly evolving
Technology has improved considerably and rapidly since the NBATA came into existence. MRIs are readily accessible, and diagnostic ultrasound is “all at our fingertips,” Johnson said.
“There are X-rays in every arena, for every game now. When I started, you had to take someone to the hospital and go in through the ER. Now if it looks OK, they can back out on the court.”
Johnson added: “It’s the tool of your mind that matters most. Staying current, staying up to date with the latest technologies and treatments.”
As valuable as NBA athletic trainers are, given who and what is at stake, it seems reasonable to wonder: Why isn’t one of them in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame? This year’s enshrinement weekend served as a reminder that, for all the players, coaches and executives honored in Springfield, Mass., none of the front-line caregivers has been so honored.
“For me, that’s really hard to understand,” said Vitti, who suggested O’Toole or Lacerte as obvious candidates. “You give your entire life dedicated to the healthcare of the team, millions and millions of dollars invested, but there’s no one there.”
The NBATA does honor its own, fortunately. It provides 30 head trainers and their staffs with support, fellowship, an outlet for giving via its foundation and, each summer at the NBA Combine in Chicago, continuing education opportunities.
Most of all, across 50 years, the association has provided a haven of collegiality in an environment otherwise of extreme competition. Rival teams might not share any insights into beating the Celtics or slowing down Victor Wembanyama, but if a trainer has had good success treating a particularly stubborn injury, his peers soon will know about it.
“When you’re talking about the well-being of players, we all have professional ethics and oaths that we take,” Corbeil said. “It’s different from sharing basketball strategies.”
Different, but with a similar shot at victories when all goes well.
“The best part,” Philadelphia’s Johnson said, “is when the player goes back out there, whatever his specialty is – rebounding, shooting, playing defense – and he’s able to do it and you win, and the guy looks at you and says ‘Thanks.’”
* * *
Steve Aschburner has written about the NBA since 1980. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on X.
The views on this page do not necessarily reflect the views of the NBA, its clubs or Warner Bros. Discovery.
