CHICAGO: The first couple of times the Cavaliers sat down to eat together, Kevin Love surveyed the room and came to an immediate conclusion.
“Nobody eats healthier than I do,” he said. “I’m always paying attention.”
As style of play has evolved in the NBA over the last few years, so too has the dietary needs of players. A number of guys are more health conscious today than ever before, while teams invest millions into nutrition, chefs, sports science and recovery methods. Some players take it more seriously than others.
“There is a lot of science behind it if you feel like getting into it,” Cavs forward Richard Jefferson said. “I don’t really care to. It’d be like a second job trying to do that stuff.”
Few take it more seriously than Love, who has lost 40 pounds and reshaped his body over the course of his career, transforming from a chubby rebounder into a slender GQ cover model.
He hired his own full-time chef when he moved to Cleveland. He had a part-time chef in Minnesota, but now doesn’t even have to shop for groceries. His personal chef handles everything from the shopping to the preparation while working in step with both Love’s Los Angeles-based nutritionist and Alex Moore, the Cavs’ director of the performance team.
“Some people eat to live, some people live to eat. I love food,” Love said. “I’m so into a routine that I enjoy eating good.”
If only all the players were so easy.
Healthy habits
Part of Derek Millender’s role as the Cavs’ strength and conditioning coach is educating players about diet and nutrition. Most aren’t eager students like Love, so it can take some coaxing.
“It’s really a slow process and you have to make sure you don’t overwhelm guys with too much information at one time,” Millender said. “Sometimes it’s as simple as focusing on one thing.”
Millender might tell a player, for example, to cut out soft drinks on game days. If that goes over well, they’ll progress to eating breakfast every morning.
“Before you start taking away, tweak some little things,” Millender said. “Taking something away from somebody they’ve been doing all their career, it can backfire. I like to start more with tweaking, talking about options with liquids and then go from there. You don’t want to turn a guy off making such drastic changes.”
Sometimes, however, drastic changes are needed. When the Cavs were rebuilding for four years, rookies and the younger players who filled the locker room would often summon a ball boy an hour before games to order chicken fingers and fries.
That rarely happens today and never with the team’s veterans. Now Millender encourages players to eat a pregame meal between two and four hours prior to games. Kyrie Irving was never a part of the chicken finger contingent, but he eats so much spaghetti on game days that a former teammate once nicknamed him “Pasta.”
Millender, however, pushes lean meats on game days and wants players to avoid beef and anything fried.
“Those are slow through your digestive system,” he said. “You don’t want to do that because instead of the blood going to your lungs and heart, all that blood is in your stomach trying to digest all that heavy food.”
Allergies used to be a problem when one former player in recent years had a severe nut allergy, but no current players have any food allergies. Fruit plates are picked over in the locker room about an hour before every game, then it’s more fruit or some trail mix at halftime.
Love eats a lot of almond butter, usually at halftime. It’s one of the foods, along with beet juice, that he consumes regularly now after believing he would never like it.
“I used to really get caught up on taste,” Love said, although he doesn’t anymore.
Postgame meals can be difficult. If it’s a home game, team chef Terry Bell provides a lean meat, vegetable and complex carb such as a whole wheat pasta, quinoa or brown rice, Millender said. If it’s a road game, however, the Cavs are at the mercy of the opposing team. Love passed on a postgame barbecue meal during a Texas swing in January, for example, instead electing to eat on the plane.
With a little advance notice, Love said the hotels will prepare meals and send them ahead for players to eat on flights. He prefers a salmon or a steak, sometimes a fatty fish and vegetables. Ultimately, postgame is a critical time in the nutrition cycle.
“That’s an ideal time for your body to recover and refuel for your next training session,” Millender said. “You have to really capitalize on that postgame meal.”
Liquid courage
Beverages, like everything else, are a negotiation. Millender discourages players from using the energy drinks flooding the market (“I like natural energy sources from foods,” he said) and doesn’t really like coffee as a pregame drink unless guys have done it for so long that their bodies are comfortable with it.
Jefferson joked how coffee is the only legal stimulant players can use before games. Andrew Bynum used to drink coffee before every game. James Jones and Matthew Dellavedova enjoy a cup, too, even after the dehydration problems that sent Dellavedova to the emergency room after Game 3 of last year’s NBA Finals. Dellavedova even goes back for a second cup at halftime when he thinks his body needs it.
“If you have it 30-60 minutes before exercise, it gives you a bit of a boost,” Dellavedova said. “I like it for that. I also just enjoy drinking coffee.”
Jones likes it because it warms the body.
“Hot coffee will raise your body temperature and you can get a sweat,” Jones said. “Just a little boost. I don’t think most guys are caffeine addicts, I think more than anything it’s a low calorie, warm drink.”
The more important drinks are the in-game drinks. Love said the Cavs measure each player’s sweat density to learn how much salt they’re secreting. Players’ drink bottles are numbered during games and each contains a different number of salt tablets to replenish the body. Love has two tablets in his drink.
“I have a lot of salt in my sweat or I sweat a lot,” he said. “It’s different for every guy. It’s a science.”
All of it is, one teams are taking more seriously these days. It’s Millender’s job to get the players to see the benefits of it.
“There are some guys that will eat certain foods and take certain supplements because they know that it works and they’ve had benefits from it,” he said. “There’s other guys that won’t. If it doesn’t taste good, they won’t have it. With that athlete you have to be willing to compromise and say, ‘OK, look, if you’re not going to go all the way to this end of the spectrum, then let’s try to meet somewhere in the middle where we’re still making progress with your diet.’”
Jason Lloyd can be reached at jlloyd@thebeaconjournal.com. Read the Cavs blog at www.ohio.com/cavs. Follow him on Twitter www.twitter.com/JasonLloydABJ.