Something must change in the NBA. It is untenable that, year after year, injuries become the leitmotiv of each season. They are arriving sooner and sooner. At this early stage, a peak 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 has surged, exposing players to continuous bursts of high-demand actions such as sprints, jumps, and twists that end up stressing connective tissues, muscles, and bone tissue.
Adam Silver, who has often cited the lack of scientific evidence behind this causality rule, seems to be waking up to the problem at hand. Tinkering with the 82-game schedule is a red line. No major mass-sport competition tends to reduce the number of games. More often, as the NFL, F1, or international football have demonstrated, the trend is to play more. It’s a simple matter: more games, more revenue. And the NBA, for each of the 1,230 regular-season games, earns an average of over $2 million that swells to as much as $6 million in markets like New York and Los Angeles.
This leaves a single solution that, to boot, already has counterparts in European basketball and the WNBA. Reducing the games to 40 minutes, trimming two per quarter, is an idea that appeals to Silver a bit more as a way to ease this load. 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 makes the commissioner a party to the plan. Whenever such a proposal comes to light, the hypothetical drawback also arises: a reduction of minutes would concentrate the intensity even more. And it is that rhythm and repetition of demands that constitutes the main problem of the current NBA.
Be that as it may, the commissioner will have to begin seeking new solutions to a problem that has lingered for a long time and has been swept under the rug. All without touching the sacred 82 games.
