Something has to change in the NBA. It is unsustainable that, year after year, injuries become the leitmotif of every season. And they are arriving earlier and earlier. At the start of this campaign, as many as 79 players have been injured at the same time. A staggering 15% of the entire league.
Every team still plays 82 games, as has been the case since 1967. But the physical demands of those games have skyrocketed, exposing players to constant high-intensity actions such as sprints, jumps and twists that end up punishing connective tissue, muscles and bone.
Adam Silver, who has often pointed to the lack of scientific evidence for this causal link, appears to be aware of the problem he is dealing with. Touching the 82 games is a red line. No mass-audience sport tends to reduce its number of fixtures. If anything, as the NFL, F1 and international football have shown, the trend is to play more and more. It is a simple matter: more games, more revenue. And for each of the 1,230 played in the regular season, the NBA earns more than $2 million on average, rising to $6 million in markets such as New York and Los Angeles.
That leaves a single solution which, as if that were not enough, already has a precedent in European basketball and the WNBA. Cutting games to 40 minutes, trimming 2 minutes per quarter, is an idea that appeals to Silver a little more as a way of easing this load. As Chris Mannix reports today in Sports Illustrated.
It is not the first time this formula has been proposed in the media, but it is the first to directly implicate the commissioner as an accomplice. Whenever such a proposal comes up, the hypothetical drawback also appears: that fewer minutes would concentrate the intensity even more. And it is that pace and repetition of demands that is the main problem of the current NBA.
However it plays out, the commissioner will have to start looking for new solutions to a problem that has been brewing for a long time and has been swept under the carpet. All without touching the sacred 82 games.
(Cover photo by Brad Penner-Imagn Images)
