Your eyes do not deceive you.
The NBA, at large, is seemingly being ravaged by injuries at a disastrous rate in 2025-2026. We’re not even a month into the season at the time of this writing, and stars like Giannis Antetokounmpo, Victor Wembanyama, Anthony Edwards, Anthony Davis, Kawhi Leonard, Zion Williamson, and Paolo Banchero are currently sitting out or have already sat out meaningful time with tricky lower-body injuries. That’s not to even mention all the smaller-name players listed on almost every team’s injury report right now. The list truly feels like it’s never-ending.
What’s behind this apparent uptick in NBA injuries, especially of a soft-tissue variety?
Well, contrary to every oldhead who thinks modern NBA players are soft, there has likely never been more of a physical demand on their bodies. Everyone is bigger, stronger, and faster than ever, which inherently puts more strain on your muscles, ligaments, bones, and joints. The league’s average pace of play by team is 100.5, which would be the fastest since the late 1980s. There is, of course, also the 3-point revolution over the last decad. At the time of publishing, the Houston Rockets are last in team 3-point attempts per game at 30.5, which is only just under the 2016 Warriors, who led the NBA that season in attempts per game at 31.8 and who many thought “ruined” the game then. With everyone firing up more shots from distance than ever, you’re basically forcing NBA players to move around and cover more ground on both ends of the court than they ever have.
Throw in a grueling (and archaic) 82-game regular-season schedule that is littered with dangerous back-to-backs and few opportunities for players to actually let their bodies recover in a healthy fashion from night to night, and you have a recipe for disaster. You have the exact, volatile mix that inevitably has some of the world’s best basketball players in elite physical condition missing games all over the place for soft-tissue injuries before we even reach Thanksgiving.
And you wonder why NBA players look like they’re playing at half-effort in a random December game or are simply going through the motions together during the annual All-Star game. Where else are they supposed to get rest for peak performance?
Something has to change. I know asking NBA commissioner Adam Silver to actually think about his players and the fans who love watching them, rather than concocting some harebrained in-season or play-in tournament, is probably unrealistic, but none of this is sustainable. Maybe he’s too busy writing op-eds in the paper of record advocating for legal nationwide sports betting that could undermine the integrity of his league. Maybe he’s too busy burying massive scandals until it’s more convenient to talk about them.
I don’t know, but it sure would be nice to see him address something else!
The NBA could shorten the regular season and start on Christmas Day, when many casual league fans start paying attention to the association. If that’s not an option for a greedy, multibillion-dollar company that doesn’t want to surrender even a single TV dollar, it could make an earnest effort to limit back-to-backs or three-games-in-four-night stretches over an extended season. It is these sorts of grueling obstacles in the schedule that probably create the most harm for athletes already pushing it to the limit as much as they can. It could make some sort of rule changes that actually disincentivize the modern 3-point barrage (which I otherwise don’t have a problem with, in itself), in turn allowing for a more tenable night-to-night play style that doesn’t turn NBA players’ ligaments into shredded meat in real time. It’s just a thought.
I’m not going to hold my breath about any of this, though. None of these suggestions are novel. We have been talking about some of them for years. If the NBA cared about its players and the product it offers, it would’ve already made some of these adjustments. But it clearly doesn’t. Trying to make players “care” more about the early season by forcing it on them was never the answer when that wasn’t the root cause behind their apparent lack of effort.
Maybe it’ll take another wave of superstars to start missing significant time before Silver and his cronies start seeing the forest for the trees. Even then, I wouldn’t bank on seeing any progress.