NBA players come to Chicago during the summer in search of the Fountain of Youth.

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Nick Friedell/ESPNChicago.com

Gilbert Arenas is one of the players who swears by ATTACK gym.

That's why Gilbert Arenas is laying on a padded black training table at 10 a.m. on a mid-August morning, allowing his physical therapist David Reavy to break down the scar tissue in his surgically repaired left knee with a purple device that looks more like a corkscrew. The Wizards star guard has the faces of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama and Malcom X tattooed across his leg which forms what he has dubbed "Black Rushmore;" you'd think if these faces could talk at the moment that they would scream out in pain, since Reavy continues to work the area that has caused his client so much pain and anguish over the past two years. For his part, Arenas doesn't seem to be bothered the prodding. He patiently lays on the table and listens to music. He trusts that Reavy and trainer Tim Grover are going to turn him back into the player he once was. That's why he came to the Windy City and that's why he has made the ATTACK Athletics facility his second home.

The multi-million dollar guard made his way to the gigantic facility on the West Side, hoping that the people inside could put him back together again. He's not the only one. If you spend a day inside the facility during the months in between the end of the NBA season and its new beginning, it's likely that you would see some of the best players in the world on a daily basis. LeBron James and Dwyane Wade have already passed through the doors in the past few months, and Kobe Bryant has been a client of Grover's for several years.

On this day, while Arenas gets his knee looked at on one side of the room, Devin Harris looks on from a few tables over and waits to have his body assessed. Over the course of the next hour, a small army of current NBA players make their way into the facilty, including: Luther Head, Bobby Simmons, Jermaine O'Neal, Antoine Walker, Kelenna Azubuike, Tracy McGrady and Andre Iguodala, among others. Some, like Arenas and McGrady, are in the process of rehabbing serious, possibly career-threatening injuries, while others, like O'Neal and Iguodala, are just trying to fight off any nagging ones and prepare themselves for the upcoming season.

But how did they end up here? What is it about this place that keeps them coming back?

The long-term answer to the first question is probably the easiest. Grover has built a reputation for himself over the years as being one of the best trainers in the NBA. He's the person who helped transform Michael Jordan into arguably the greatest basketball player of all time. As my colleague Scott Powers noted back in May, Grover has built up a trust with some of the NBA's elite by showing them that the hard work they put in during the summer will ultimately pay off during the season. That's why they pay a large sum of money to have the he and Reavy push them through various training exercises day after day.

"You gotta show up, you gotta work hard and you gotta listen," Grover says. "If you're not willing to do those things, we can't help ya."

The short term answer as to how some of these players ended up here has to do with the rejuvenation of Wade. Due to various injuries, the Heat star looked broken down during the 2007-08 season and plenty of people wondered if his career had already hit its peak and was headed downward. He came to Grover and Reavy during this past off-season and the pair helped rejuvenate his career. He helped the USA win a gold medal during the Beijing games in 2008 and earned MVP consideration during the year. His path back to success helped convince a lot of players into thinking that they create one of their own.

"[Guys] probably saw Dwyane Wade, how his body changed from last year to this year how he was able to ... man, be great out there [again]," Head says. "They probably looked at that as motivation."

NBA athletes could go anywhere in the world to train, though. Aside from the obvious impact that the facility had on Wade's resurgence what else is it about ATTACK that keeps attracting the biggest names in the business?

"I think in the past, I didn't have the type of treatment that I get from Dave. I didn't have the physical therapy part of the treatment," McGrady says, as he is now sitting on one of the training tables. "In the past, it was just basically strength and conditioning, lifting weights and stuff on the basketball court. I didn't have this other stuff to come to, making sure after a workout, making sure my muscles are still firing after my workout, after I've done basketball court work. They got a great formula here -- I wish I had been a part of this a long time ago."

Nick Friedell/ESPNChicago.com

On the West Side, NBA players say they are finding their own Fountain of Youth.

McGrady didn't want to discount the work of his long-time trainer Wayne Hall, but his point was clear, and it's one that Grover knows all too well: the days of one-on-one training between an athlete and a trainer are way out of style.

"We sit down every day and have a plan together. The days of working out with one individual or only seeing one person, those days are over with," Grover says. "To get an athlete better, injury-free and everything, you need a team of individuals.

"If you see what goes on in here, an athlete will touch, maybe four or five people on that same day. Each one has an expertise, each one has a protocol that's been put together, that needs to be followed and when that happens, that's when the results come in."

One of the most important people in that group is Reavy. He joined Grover's team a little over three years ago and he's one of the first people that the athletes see when they walk into the door.

"If you look across the league in sports, a lot of people keep getting injured, a different injury. They made their knee strong so their knee's not gonna hurt anymore, but their back hurts, or vice versa , or it's their shoulder, or their foot. It just goes up and down the whole kinetic chain," Reavy says. "So if you lose motion somewhere, your body's gonna compensate for that lack of motion and then the body becomes inefficient at that point cause certain muscles are designed to do certain things."

Reavy has developed an entire methodology towards helping athletes get better, with one of the goals being the abilty to "activate the muscles" in the athlete's body to help them become lighter on the floor. It's a buzz phrase of sorts to the physical therapist and all the facilty's clients.

"With us, [we're] so used to this being natural, but once you get in the league, five six, seven, eight years, your body has to keep up with itself, so you just can't come in and go play three or four games a day without hurting," Iguodala says. "So what they do is get everything activated, get everything in motion."

Reavy puts it this way: "A scout looks for natural talent, I look for natural movement."

That's why he is constantly keeping a close on the way each muscle in a player's body reacts to the treatment. "One of the things that I see is that people don't use their body efficiently or effectively, so I make sure they're using all the muscles appropriately. When they use all their muscles appropriately they absorb the force equally, and not one joint absorbs the force more than the other."

In many ways, Reavy's job is to balance the athlete out so that Grover can take them to the next level of mental and physical preparation. That's why people like McGrady spend most of their time on this day shuffling between working with Reavy on one side of the gym and Grover on the other.

"Sometimes, you can go to rehab and it prolongs over time, because they're afraid to push the clients," Simmons says. "Here, that's what Attack is, the best can always get better."

To prove that point, the healthy players congregate during the middle of almost every day on the main court in the facility and play a series of games. The intensity level of these games seems to be much higher compared to the usual summer league affairs.

"A lot of guys have runs, but the runs here are really good," Igoudala says. "[The games are] competitive, everybody's going hard and you get guys coming in here all the time with something to prove. So a guy like myself get a big contract, another guy wants to come in and prove that he thinks he's the same. It's kind of like the same [attitude] during the season, where here it's not just the summer -- it's like [a regular] season [attitude], so everybody's playing hard."

Everybody plays hard under the watchful eyes of Grover, Reavy and a handful of various employees and guests. The trainers shuffle in and out because there are other clients to attend to, the action is just in a day's work for the people at ATTACK.

"It's almost like a basketball player's dream place," Azubuike says. "They got a barber shop here, they got a massage therapist -- it's nice."

There's no question the ATTACK facility is one of the nicest in the country, but that's not really why all these NBA stars continue to travel back to Chicago year after year. They come because Grover and Reavy have proven that they can make an athlete feel whole once again.

"We're basically result-driven," Reavy says. "We want to get everybody better. We're not geared towards one team or another. We're just here for the guys. Whoever comes in here, we treat everybody the same as far as getting them better and back."

Grover sums everything up another way right before he heads off to get another one of his client's careers back on track.

"We feel like there isn't a single injury that an athlete has, that we can't get them back from," he says with a stone-cold straight face. "I honestly believe that."

If you've ever wondered why so many rehabbing NBA stars call Chicago home in the summer, there's your answer.

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