The NBA season is barely a month old, and already there have been several injuries to stars across the league. Giannis Antetokounmpo and Victor Wembanyama are the latest additions who will be sidelined for several weeks as the Bucks superstar recovers from a groin strain, while the Spurs big man deals with a calf strain.
Anthony Davis, Ja Morant, Jrue Holiday, Ty Jerome and rookie Dylan Harper are all also dealing with calf strains. Trae Young, Jonathan Kuminga and Derrick Jones Jr. are out with knee injuries, while Kawhi Leonard and Dorian Finney-Smith are dealing with ankle injures. That is by no means an exhaustive list, as practically every team in the league is dealing with at least two injuries on their team.
Injuries are part of the game, but for so many to be happening this quickly into the season isn’t typical. And that’s not including the season-ending injuries that have happened, like a hip fracture to Bradley Beal. Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr said the uptick in injuries this season has been a concerning trend, as his team alone will have five players out Wednesday night against the Miami Heat, including Stephen Curry. Another three players are listed as questionable, including Jimmy Butler and Draymond Green.
“[The Warriors’ medical staff] believes that the wear and tear, the speed, the pace, the mileage is factoring into these injuries,” Kerr said Tuesday night before Golden State’s 121-113 loss to the Orlando Magic.
“Across the league, everyone understands that it’s easier to score if you beat the opponent down the floor, get out in transition,” Kerr said. “But when everybody’s doing that, the games are much higher-paced. Everyone has to cover out to 25 feet because everybody can shoot 3s. We have all the data. Players are running faster and further [than] before. We’re trying to do the best we can, but we basically have a game every other night. It’s not an easy thing to do.”
The average pace around the league is 100.5 right now, which is the highest its been since the 1988-89 season. The difference between now and the 80s, though, like Kerr said, is everyone is spacing their offense out to the 3-point line. Because of that, it’s forcing players to cover more ground on defense, and moving around more instead of remaining stationary for much of a single possession. There’s far more off-ball movement in today’s era, so players are traveling greater distances in a single game.
Couple that with frequent back-to-back games and an 82-game schedule, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for players to be worn out and more susceptible to injuries before we even hit Christmas.
“We literally haven’t had a single practice on this road trip,” Kerr said. “Not one. We’ve been gone a week or longer. Eight days, not one practice. It’s just game, game, game. So not only is there no recovery time, there’s no practice time. What was different was back in the day, you did have four [games] in five nights, which was not great, but then you’d have four days between games. You’d take a day off and have a couple good practices.”
Despite outside perspective that a solution to these injuries would be to reduce the number of regular season games, the league has never seriously considered taking that route. Primarily because both the players and the league stand to lose money if you start cutting games. That means less revenue from every corner for the league, including arena revenue, advertisement dollars and television partners. If there’s money to be lost, the players and the league would never agree to that, and Kerr knows that.
“The tricky part is all the constituents would have to agree to take less revenue,” Kerr said. “In 2025 in America, good luck in any industry. Imagine some big company saying, ‘You know what, we’re not as concerned about our stock price. We’re actually concerned with employing people and giving people a stable job and making our product better.’ That’s not happening. You know that.”
Unless the league makes a drastic change to the schedule that would limit the amount of wear and tear on the players’ bodies, we’ll continue to see these injuries pop up more frequently. That in turn means we’ll continue to see players rest for “injury management” which is just the new fancy term for load management. And as Kerr mentioned, with so many games happening so frequently, we’ll also see more teams practicing less, especially on the road if it means preserving the players while they have four games in six nights like the Warriors just had between Nov. 7-12.
The current NBA schedule doesn’t lend itself to how the modern game is played. But we’ll likely never see that change as long as everyone involved is more concerned about the monetary portion of it all.
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