“My first year coaching, I thought I could plan the whole thing out,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said last Tuesday, before Durant’s injury.

“Then you realize you can’t, really,” Kerr said. “You might circle a date on the calendar where you go ‘I might give so-and-so a day off here.’ Maybe he’s feeling great that night. And then you think, he’s definitely going to play this night. (But) maybe he tweaked his ankle the day before. So you can’t really predict it. You can look at the schedule and see some games where you know your guys are going to be tired … but you really have to play it by ear, day by day.”

The Dubs also are in the midst of a ridiculously tough patch geographically -- a nine-day East coast trip to Philly, D.C., Chicago, New York and Atlanta, a flight home Monday night for a single game at Oracle Arena Wednesday night against the Celtics, then back on the road for back-to-back games against the Minnesota Timberwolves (Friday) and Spurs (Saturday).

That Spurs game had a flashing red light on it as a potential rest/DNP night for some of the Warriors’ stars. Now, the Warriors may not be able to afford to give a game to San Antonio. It’s part of the calculus almost every contending team has to deal with in the last month.

“You look at times where you can steal minutes for guys in certain situations,” Casey said. “But it’s very difficult when every possession’s important and you’re trying to scratch out games and you’re trying to win games.”

Assessing rest and recovery is a year-long process by all teams, which use wearables to monitor fitness and stress levels starting in training camp and throughout the season. Half the teams in the league use Catapult monitors; others swear by Viper pods to take down the numbers. They also use biochambers and modified diets to help their players sleep, and devices like the NormaTec to aid in recovery.

Teams hook their players to these devices on planes and in hotels. They use specific hot and cold tub plans based on the team’s schedule, offer sleep education via apps and online, and encourage their players pack their bags with recovery rather than high fashion in mind.

The Raptors experimented with a different shootaround start time last season.

The National Basketball Players Association is building “rest pods” in its new midtown Manhattan location for visiting players who just want to take a midday nap. “We wanted a space where players could come and not be inundated by the noise of the staff,” NBPA Executive Director Michele Roberts said recently.

“At the beginning of the year, we do a study of our travel, number one,” said Alex McKechnie, the Toronto Raptors' Director of Sports Science. “We look at the extent of travel. We all do the same thing; I get it. But it’s just how it falls with follow up of games, certain games, etcetera. And we get some degrees of predictions of games that are likely to be more of an issue than others. So what we do is we do that initially. We really concern ourselves with recovery more than anything throughout the course of the year. That’s something, it’s not about just all of a sudden, you figure you ought to be resting people.”

The search for rest never ends. Teams have been adjusting their postgame and shootaround routines for years in order to give their players the best chance to get a good night’s sleep. Teams going from West to East on long road trips have tried flying later in the day after playing the night before, so their players can get a good night’s sleep before traveling across multiple time zones. They’ve had their players stay up later upon arrival than normal so their body clocks stay on the same rhythm as if they were at home.

The Raptors were one of the teams that went to later shootarounds than the normal 10-11 a.m. window on game days two years ago.

“You’re not going to sleep right after the game; none of us do,” McKechnie said. “You don’t; I don’t, everybody else doesn’t. So what’s the logic of having a 10 o’clock practice? It doesn’t make sense. So we pushed that back and pushed that back, pushed that back, and tried to become more realistic about how we were going to do this moving forward.”

But the Raptors went back to their old shootaround times this season.

“For us, this year, I think we needed the repetitions in practice, defensively offensively, and used to get better,” Casey said. “I think two years ago, we went to the afternoon shootarounds. I thought our defense slipped. Our repetitions, our habits slipped a little bit. And so it’s not punishment, it’s just making sure that we’re continuing to create good habits. And the only time to really do that is at shootaround, it seems to me.”