It’s time to talk about injuries.
I held off on writing about the apparent rash, or rise, of early-season athlete injuries because there’s always some recency bias involved when the subject comes up. Are there really more injuries this year than any other? Do we have the data to support it? Is there a new, underlying cause? Or are injuries due to the same compounding mix of bad luck and the NBA’s 82 game schedule running into a long postseason, running into the offseason, running back into a brand new long regular season and the erosion of bodies this eventually leads to?
A report early this week showed early-season injuries were up 35%, and indeed ESPN’s list of injuries, at a glance, looks like a ferocious Christmas tree, lit up in blazing reds and yellows. A handful of teams (the Grizzlies, Pelicans, Raptors) are cobbling together rosters game-to-game depending on who’s still healthy. TrueHoop’s Henry Abbott ran a draft of the injured list this week and each team reads like an All-Star squad on steroids, and when Abbott printed out the league’s official injury report it was 10 pages long.
Injuries are definitely up — but why?
The Paris Olympics proved extra playing time for a few top-tier stars, but most of them remain healthy. The early season schedule hasn’t served up any more back-to-backs to longer road game stretches, which tend to be more gruelling on athletes, than usual. However, when everything appears to be normal and the bodily price is anything but, perhaps it’s time to examine that “normal”.
The NBA’s current schedule of 82 games was adopted in 1967. Already, I’m sure your brain is picturing black and white basketball, that’s good. When you picture that grainy, glitchy footage, how fast is it going? The reality is that the game used to be a lot slower. Not just in its mechanics (think of an offensive passing sequence, the ball flipping from set of hands to hands at a speed that can be hard to follow), but the athleticism too. Bodies were moving slower. The game was still physical — the trope of players from the 80s and 90s complaining about the “softness” of current athletes is a trope for a reason — but full tilt sprinting, cutting, complex rotations, these weren’t the norm. Given that, the bodily mechanics were different. Guys weren’t stopping on a dime, pivoting hard, having to force their ligaments and muscles and bones into exacting motions with all sorts of volatile force behind them.
There are plenty of arguments for why the regular season should shortened (and not just for ratings), but the modernization of the game has always struck me as the most logical. Basketball has changed, accelerated, and it isn’t going to stop. That’s what happens naturally with evolution and adaptation, and when you throw billions of dollars behind that evolution from every direction (cable networks, streaming giants, endorsements, recovery technologies, sports science), things perceptibly speed up.
Inevitably, the term load management begins to get tossed around with talk of injuries — whether it’s good, bad, necessary, relevant. Last winter Adam Silver suggested load management had gone “too far” and there’s long been tension between the concept and fans who worry they won’t get to see star athletes play. I’ve written on the topic and spoke to sports scientists about it, and the main takeaway is that there isn’t enough information. Load management isn’t just one thing. It accounts for a huge spectrum that touches on training, nutrition, mental health, personal habits, recovery, team preferences, the list goes on.
“You can play with the numbers as you like, it’s like reading tarots,” Dr. Franco Impellizzeri, a professor in Sport and Exercise Science and Medicine at the University of Technology Sydney, told me once.
To really test the effects of an 82 game schedule, ironically, requires time players don’t have because of that same schedule. They can’t take time away during a season to be studied under the required supervision that sort of research needs.
I’m not suggesting the regular NBA season be shortened in order to run diagnostics on the model itself (though that would be a great), but there’s very clearly enough insight, and now a bodily toll, to suggest abiding by old methods isn’t helping to move the game forward. By stubbornly sticking to what was done in the past the NBA runs the risk — even within its season-to-season acceleration toward advancing the game — of leaving itself behind.
