Mikal Bridges ‘Iron Man’ streak goes all the way back to high school

If you have been following the NBA for a long period of time, you may be saying to yourself about Phoenix Suns forward Mikal Bridges’ 449-game consecutive game streak, “What’s the big deal? Players back in the 80s and 90s played all the time.” In the 1980s and 1990s, players routinely played 82 games and playoff games. It was a bigger story when you didn’t play all 82 games. That all started to change in the early 2000s when Greg Popovich and the Spurs implemented a form of load management.

At the time, it wasn’t called “load management”. Coach Popovich wanted to rest his stars, considering they played overseas during the off-season.

“I never did load management. I never took out a sheet of paper and said, ‘he’s going to do this, he’s going to do that,’” he said once before facing the Boston Celtics. “Manu Ginobili and Tony Paker played more minutes than anybody in the world ever when you count what they did in the summers for so long and when they started playing pro ball. So it was just logical to try to watch their minutes.”

Whatever you wanted to call it, that’s where the idea started to take root. Teams like the 76ers and Raptors executed this process with star players like Joel Embiid and Kawhi Leonard. Load management is now the rule more than the exception for all NBA teams. That’s part of what makes Bridges 449 consecutive games played even more impressive.

The 449 consecutive games I mentioned earlier are currently the longest NBA streak. This run spans his entire five years in the NBA and four years in college (he red-shirted his first year). The last game Bridges missed came in his junior year of high school. Even that game he wanted to play. His coach knew he would try to find his way into the game even though he was sick, so he made him stay home during a tournament.

Bridges played all 116 games at Villanova and spoke on his mentality on playing every game in college.

“At school, at ‘Nova, you didn’t miss a game for nothing,” Bridges said. “You gotta really not be able to play. That’s where it really, really came from. Just knowing if you’re nicked up, just playing every game.”

Bridges has carried that mentality into the NBA. In a time where first-year players are sitting out back-to-backs even though they are healthy, Bridges continues to go out every night and not just play but defend the opposing teams best guard or wing player. Bridges is usually one of the league’s top players in total miles he travels per game (2.62 per game), which means he isn’t just sitting in the corner. Last season, he racked up 212 total miles per NBA.com stats.

Bridges has a long way to go to catch the all-time NBA leader in consecutive games. That honor goes to AC Green, who played in a remarkable 1192 games without an absence. Green’s streak went from November 1986 until April 2001. Bridges, at 333 NBA games and counting, is already third on the list behind only Green and Randy Smith (who?) who finished with 906.

With NBA teams becoming more and more cautious with their players, the fact that Bridges has not missed a game in his four-plus seasons is an achievement. Go ahead and bet against Bridges catching Green’s record if you want, but with only 860 to go, it will only take about 10 more seasons to...ok, well, maybe some records are meant to never be broken.

Regardless of Green’s uncatchable record, Bridges has shown he is the modern-day Iron Man, which is all the more remarkable considering he made it through a pandemic that sent just about everyone else to the unavailable list at least once.