What an NBA Team's Own Staff Found About Travel and Performance

In October 2025, Jennifer Russell and colleagues from the Oklahoma City Thunder's Human and Player Performance department published a study in the Journal of Sports Sciences titled "Factors affecting NBA game performance over the course of a season."

The study tracked 14 NBA players across the 2017–18 season, collecting training load, travel variables (elevation, timezone changes, nights away from home), subjective wellness measures (fatigue, soreness, sleep, stress, mood), and individual game performance metrics.

Key findings

Defensive performance varied significantly with three variables:

Timezone acclimation also negatively impacted mood.specifically after westward travel without a full day of acclimatization. This effect was not present after eastward travel, consistent with the circadian literature showing that phase delays (westward) are generally easier than phase advances (eastward) but can still disrupt performance when recovery time is insufficient.

Interestingly, other subjective measures.fatigue, soreness, sleep quality, and stress.did not show significant effects from any travel or load variables in their model. The authors suggest this may be due to the timing of data collection (training days only, not game days).

Why this matters

This is an NBA team's own performance staff publishing, in a peer-reviewed journal, that travel and environmental variables measurably affect game performance. They quantified the problem. They did not predict it.

Their conclusion section reads like a product brief for what Obeo builds: "Teams may benefit from strategies to mitigate the impact of these factors on players, such as arriving one full day per time zone crossed, implementing light acclimatization sessions, and proactively adjusting sleep strategies to manage physiological disruption."

Obeo generates those strategies automatically.personalized to each player, stress-tested across simulated scenarios, and backed by the same physiological models the research community uses.

The gap between "we measured that travel hurts performance" and "we predicted who would be affected and what to do about it" is exactly where Obeo operates.