Hayes: Sixers' Jahlil Okafor is worn out, needs rest

Ideally, Jahlil Okafor won't play for the 76ers Friday night against Miami, either.

Officially, he is nursing a bruised shin, which cost him the last two games. More obviously, he is exhausted.

No one really is to blame.

This would be the 54th game for Okafor, who played just 38 games last year for Duke, his only college season. If you remember the NCAA championship game, he didn't look particularly fresh in that one, either.

Two years ago Okafor was playing high school basketball, mostly as a 17-year-old. He was 19 for the first half of this NBA season.

An 82 game professional season -- with its travel, its irregular windows for sleep and rest and its nightly sumo wrestling matches in the paint -- is impossibly grueling for a 25-year-old. It is madness to think a 20-year-old kid would be able to make it through an entire season without hitting a wall.

The thing is, since the team returned from the All-Star break, Okafor looks like he's hitting a wall of bricks halfway through every third period.

Hitting it with his head, backing up, and hitting it again.

Regardless of the pace of the game, he labors up and down the court after five or six minutes have elapsed in the second half.

Could he be better conditioned? Possibly.

Could it be an issue with his diet, or his rest habits? Considering his off-the-court problems in his first two months as a pro, that's a fair question.

At any rate, in a season in which the only viable return is the development of Okafor, Nerlens Noel and Jerami Grant, it makes less and less sense to play them full allotment of minutes; especially Okafor and Noel. They need experience, but returns diminish when the player is exhausted.

Noel recently seems distracted, confused, and passive: all catastrophic traits for a player who's only real strengths so far  are rooted in his ability to be hyper-attentive and super-aggressive. Maybe he's tired, too.

It's only his second year, and he is only 21 years old, and he gives up 10 to 50 pounds to the players he defends every night. If he's worn out, he's worn out.

Both average about 30 minutes per game. Maybe the solution is to cut that number back by 5 minutes for the remaining 21 games. Maybe the solution is to give one of them every third game off.

Maybe that affords development without grinding them into the ground.

Because what is there to gain from doing that?