Something has to change in the NBA. It is unsustainable that, year after year, injuries become the leitmotif of each season. They are happening earlier and earlier. At the start of this season, a maximum of 79 players have already been injured simultaneously. A staggering 15% of the league’s total.
Each team continues to play 82 games, as has been the norm since 1967. But the physical toll of these games has surged, leaving players exposed to ongoing high-demand actions such as bursts, jumps, and twists that end up stressing connective tissues, muscles, and bone tissue.
Adam Silver, who has often argued the lack of scientific evidence behind this causation rule, seems to be aware of the problem he faces. Reducing the 82 games is a red line. No major league in popular sports tends to reduce the number of games. Rather, as demonstrated by the NFL, F1, or international football (soccer), the trend is to play more. It’s a simple matter: more games means more revenue. And the NBA, for each of the 1,230 games played in the regular season, earns more than $2 million on average, a figure that swells to as much as $6 million in markets like New York and Los Angeles.
This leaves a single solution that, if anything, already has a mirror in European basketball and the WNBA. Reducing the games to 40 minutes, cutting 2 minutes per quarter, is an idea that appeals a bit more to Silver as a means to ease this burden. As Chris Mannix reports today in Sports Illustrated.
It isn’t the first time this formula has been proposed by the media, but it is the one that directly implicates the commissioner as an accomplice. Whenever such a proposal comes to light, the hypothetical drawback also arises that shortening 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.
Be that as it may, the commissioner is going to have to start seeking new solutions for a problem that has long been there and has been swept under the rug. All without touching the sacred 82 games.
