This season, the NBA's best players have been actually playing seemingly less than ever as load management has transformed from a buzzword to an immutable fact of life. The best way to ensure that your stars can keep playing is to, uh, not let them play. As such, New York Knicks All-Star Julius Randle is the NBA's greatest anomaly: an All-Star who refuses to miss games.

“I understand the science and all that different stuff behind it,” Julius Randle told Zach Brazille of the New York Post. “But I guess have my own science.”

For the Knicks, Randle's resistance to load management has played a major role in their surprising success. While his per-game averages (25.3 points, 10.4 points, 4.2 assists in 35.8 minutes) are already impressive, his true impact is most accurately captured in his raw totals.

Having played in all 65 games so far this season, Randle has played a whopping 2,327 minutes, the second-most in the entire NBA. Similarly, his 1,646 points rank fifth among all players and his 679 rebounds are third. A lackluster showing in the 3-Point Contest notwithstanding, Randle is even an elite marksman, making the league's eighth-most triples to boot.

To put Randle's prolific production in context, he has secured more rebounds than Giannis Antetokoumnpo, made more treys than Steph Curry and scored exactly as many points as Kawhi Leonard and Zion Williamson combined. 

Alongside the nearly equally industrious Jalen Brunson, Randle has keyed the Knicks' sudden emergence as a quasi-contender. In this sense, Julius Randle and the Knicks have proven that the surest way to win games is by playing them.