Screens are collisions and we count them like passes

Setting picks is impact work performed dozens of times a night, logged as a neutral event and absent from every load conversation.

Think about what a screen actually is. A stationary man braces while somebody running at pace hits him in the chest or the shoulder. Then he pivots under that contact and accelerates in the opposite direction. He will do this forty times before the fourth quarter, and it will be recorded, if it is recorded at all, as a screen assist when a shot happens to follow.

That is impact work. We have a whole vocabulary for impact load in other sports, and in basketball we have essentially nothing, because the sport does not think of itself as a collision game and the tracking systems were built to measure movement rather than contact.

Consider the asymmetry inside one lineup. A guard runs further. A screening big absorbs more force. Both appear in the same minutes column with the same number next to their names, and any load model built on distance and speed will conclude that the big had the easier night. Anyone who has watched him try to get out of a chair the following morning would disagree.

I am not claiming a causal chain from screen volume to any particular injury, because I do not have the data and neither does anybody who is telling you otherwise in confident terms. What I am claiming is narrower and I think unarguable. We do not count the thing at all. You cannot manage a load you have never measured, and the fact that a big's contribution is described in the language of unselfishness rather than the language of physical cost is a tell about how little attention it gets.

There is an obvious practical consequence. Rest decisions get made on minutes. A centre in an offence that runs sixty ball screens a night is carrying a different week from a centre in a post up heavy system with the same minutes, and nobody is adjusting for it.

The technology to fix this is not exotic. Contact events are detectable. Somebody has to decide it is worth logging, which means somebody has to decide the screener is doing work rather than standing still.

Until then the most physically taxed job on the floor remains the one the box score describes with a blank space.