The NBA needs to be more honest about injuries, according to the architect of the team that just won the championship, At his end-of-season press conference Monday, Sam Presti, the executive vice president and general manager of the Oklahoma City Thunder, told reporters that there is no sense in refusing to acknowledge that the increased physical demands of the game and the schedule have led to injuries.
“I think the one thing we have to do is get away from the defensive nature of trying to convince people, players and teams that there’s no connection between the loads and the injuries,” Presti said. “We’re kind of bordering on a level of — it’s almost insulting, you know? It doesn’t mean it’s anyone’s fault. It doesn’t mean we don’t want our best players playing every single night. It’s not a matter of players not wanting to play or being soft or anything like that. But I don’t think we should be putting our head in the sand and acting like there’s no correlation.”
After three Achilles tears during the playoffs — stars Tyrese Haliburton of the Indiana Pacers, Jayson Tatum of the Boston Celtics and Damian Lillard of the Milwaukee Bucks all went down — there is increased attention on this issue, but it by no means new. In January 2024, the NBA sent a 57-page memo to teams on the subject of load management. It stated that, based on data from 10 years of regular-season games, it did not find that resting players made them less susceptible to injury. Technically, it did not conclude that rest doesn’t mitigate injury risk, either, but it effectively muddied the waters, arguing that it does not have evidence that load management works.
To Presti, a sample like the one in that study is insufficient, as it does not take into account how the game has changed. Players have to move faster and cover much more ground than they used to. Oklahoma City made it to the NBA Finals in part because it balanced a particularly intense style of play with a deep rotation, allowing it to keep its starters’ minutes relatively low. Indiana did the same thing.
“If we’re pointing to data, the data is from 20 years ago or 10 years ago,” Presti said. “The game is a totally different sport than it was even several years ago because of the amount of possessions, the way the offenses work now. It’s not people standing around the 3-point line waiting for double teams and then the ball to get kicked out. There’s so much movement in every possession. We’re playing almost like two games compared to 10 years ago and how involved the bodies are.”
Thirteen months ago, Presti said the NBA needed to pay attention to how its recent policies were “colliding with each other,” making the case that its anti-rest policies and changes to the schedule and the officiating could result in star players being unavailable in the playoffs. The Thunder may have benefited from an opposing star being diminished — and then seriously injured — late in the Finals, but Presti is still concerned about this.
“Everyone’s trying to play as much as possible because of the 65-game rule,” Presti said. “Then you take into consideration the fact that the last half of the schedule is more condensed than it has been In the last 10 years because the in-season tournament cannot have back-to-back games on those days. So you’ve got much less flexibility in the schedule, a game that’s really redlining compared to past seasons in terms of the overall movement and torque on your body, the uptick in physicality that we have because that’s where we want the game to go — and that’s a good thing, but then you go right into the postseason and those games are even more physical. So it’s not a guys-don’t-want-to-play thing. I think it’s more a we-want-the-guys-to-be-able-to-play thing. And putting our heads together and be rational about it and not defensive and [not] trying to produce numbers and data that indicates that, the more you play, the more healthy you are.”
Before Game 1 of the Finals in Oklahoma City, NBA commissioner Adan Silver told reporters that the league and its competition committee would continue to study “every form of data we can get our hands on.” He refrained, however, from saying that the current schedule is a problem.
“I don’t want to make a change just to make a change,” Silver said. “People are asking, ‘Should we shorten the season, spread the games out over a longer period of time?’ I don’t necessarily think we should reduce the number of games. If we had more days to work with, there is no question that if players are better rested, putting aside injuries, that that potentially leads to a little bit of heightened competition. I think a little bit what you see in the playoffs, too, because they’re better rested. We’re up against also players needing to take time off, needing to have an offseason.”
Asked specifically about the financial aspect of potentially shortening the season, Silver reiterated the league’s stance: It does not accept the premise that fewer games would mean fewer injuries.
“Money’s part of it, there’s no question about it,” Silver said. “We’re a business. Having said that, I don’t really see the benefit to reducing the number of games. People used to say you should reduce the number of games because it will lead to a reduction in a number of injuries. We have absolutely no data to suggest that. If that were the case, you would think you have more injuries in April than October. We don’t see that. Or you would think you’d see more injuries in the playoffs than you do in the regular season. We don’t see that, either.”
Last week, before the NBA Draft, Silver told ESPN’s Malika Andrews that the league is trying “to figure out what’s going on” with Achilles injuries specifically.
“We had already convened a panel of experts before Tyrese’s most recent Achilles rupture,” Silver said. “So we had seven this year. We had zero last year under the exact same circumstances, and the most we’ve ever had in a season [before this one] is four. The NFL has had a rash of Achilles issues as well.”
Silver said on ESPN that it is “not clear” that the 82-game schedule is a factor, citing another 10-year sample. “When we look back at the last 10 years, the majority of the Achilles injuries have happened before the All-Star break,” he said. He also pointed to other factors that likely have something to do with it.
“Modern NBA players, even when they’re not playing games, sometimes in the summer they’re working harder than they are during the season when they’re playing three games a week,” Silver said. “They’re often playing every day. Some experts think it may have more to do with youth basketball. It may have as much to do with what they do from 10 to 19; increasingly, they’re single-sport athletes. These guys train, also, harder. When I talk to veteran players — and I was talking to Andre Iguodala the other day, the head of the players’ association — he was saying he’s counseling a lot of these players that they need more rest on their body in the offseason. I mean, you’ve got guys working out three times a day.”
Then Silver said that he was hopeful that artificial intelligence could help prevent these injuries from occurring. He said that AI could potentially “ingest all video of every game a player has played in to see if we can detect there’s some pattern that we didn’t realize that leads to an Achilles injury.”
Unlike Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, Presti stopped short of arguing that the NBA must shorten the season. “I don’t know all the things that they’re balancing,” he said. Presti did, however, argue that the goal is to have “the best players on the floor for the biggest games” and that the league needs to “have respect for the players” in terms of how it frames this discussion. The implication was clear: The longer that the league maintains that there is nothing that suggests more rest and recovery would mean fewer injuries, the more disrespectful it is.
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