Load management 101: Looking at how the Raptors have treated Kawhi Leonard
TORONTO — Clive Brewer likes to compare high-performance athletes to F-14 fighter jets.
“They’ll fly right at the edge of physics,” he said. “They’ll do things that are incredibly agile and they’ll twist and they’ll turn. But if one thing goes wrong with them, they crash and burn.
“Compare that to a jumbo jet. It flies pretty high, pretty far, pretty fast,” Brewer continued. “But it will fly on one engine. Jumbo jets, they’re not gonna perform in the high-performance environments, but they’ll keep going.”
As the Toronto Blue Jays’ assistant director of high performance, Brewer knows all about the nuances of “load management,” a term that — contrary to popular belief — wasn’t coined by the Toronto Raptors. But the Raptors certainly popularized the term that’s become both part of the team’s lexicon this season and a lightning rod for fans.