Soft tissues are having a moment. Warriors head coach Steve Kerr rang the bell on the tissue issue this week when he told ESPN's Anthony Slater that he is "very concerned" about the dangers inherent to the NBA's ascendant style of play. Shooting has warped the floor. Active, frantic defending is now required across all but a narrow band of space straddling the half-court line. To make matters worse, the game is once again getting faster: The league's average pace, a measure of possessions per 48 minutes, is presently at its highest level since 1989; also, ESPN says that players are covering more distance and at higher speeds than at any other time in the tracking era, which goes back to 2013. The schedule is relentless and the league now fines teams for what it considers ill-timed load management. These conditions, as Kerr sees it, are causing a breakdown of the important stretchy things found in human joints.
It cannot be denied that soft tissue injuries are rampant, and it is only mid-November. Eight teams played games Thursday night, and every one of them came in mangled by injuries to key players. In Orlando, the Clippers brought a team featuring James Harden but missing Kawhi Leonard to face, and to lose to, a Magic squad waiting for the return of Paolo Banchero. Leonard, who due to injuries has been functionally a part-time NBA player since 2017, has been out since Nov. 3 with foot and ankle troubles. The Clippers were 3–3 during his brief brush with good health, and they are 1–8 without him. Banchero, the only player on the Magic roster to ever have made an All-Star team, has now missed four straight games with a groin injury; head coach Jamahl Mosley declined Thursday to even provide a loose timeline for his recovery.
In Memphis, a sad-sack Grizzlies team struggling along without both Ja Morant and Jaren Jackson Jr. beat the absolute hell out of a Kings team missing Domantas Sabonis. Probably there are hoops fans out there who will tune into a Kings game just to watch 37-year-old Russell Westbrook, but you for sure would not want to sit next to any of these people on an airplane. Fans of the victorious Grizzlies were treated to efficient playmaking from VCU's own Vince Williams Jr., and the best game of Jock Landale's life. It will take something special to unseat this starless 41-point massacre as the worst game of this NBA season.
Tyrese Maxey was heroic and Paul George was ambulatory for a Joel Embiid-less 76ers team that needed overtime to triumph in Milwaukee over a Bucks team missing Giannis Antetokounmpo. Giannis, like Banchero, is managing an injured groin; Embiid is managing pain in his right knee, presumably in addition to 13 other injuries. The 76ers are so used to playing without Embiid that it's not even all that clear that they miss him anymore. Philadelphia's three star players have played a total of 15 games together since George came over in free agency in the summer of 2024; already this season Embiid and George have combined to miss 22 games. Antetokounmpo, generally a rock, was hurt early in a loss Monday to the Cavaliers, and is expected to be out a week. The Bucks struggled to recreate him Thursday night, in the aggregate, from the production of Bobby Portis and Kyle Kuzma.
In the final game of the night, the Atlanta Hawks, sans Trae Young, lost to the San Antonio Spurs, sans both Stephon Castle and Victor Wembanyama. The Hawks have other cool guys—Jalen Johnson is starting to have the look—but Young is their star and playmaker and the source of their offensive identity. The Spurs, meanwhile, are a fun dark-horse in the West, but without Castle and Wembanyama they are De'Aaron Fox and some guys, a combination that manages to be even less interesting than what they were before they drafted Wembanyama, when they were nothing.
The star players who sat Thursday night due to soft tissue injuries have combined to earn 35 All-Star appearances, 23 All-NBAs, 19 All-Defensive nods, three MVPs, four Defensive Players of the Year, four Rookies of the Year, a couple of scoring titles, three championships, and a healthy couple of fistfuls of various statistical crowns. Between them, they make up just about every reason an average casual sports fan would have for tuning into this slate of basketball games.
I don't imagine a solution for the soft tissue situation is coming in the form of on-court rules changes, and another style revolution seems unlikely, although The Time Of Wemby might have some surprising contours. NBA players have become astonishingly, breathtakingly athletic, so that even a crotchety old relic of a hoops fan like me must admit that Amen Thompson wormholed into the NBA of 1995 would be basically a demigod. The game, the way that it is now played, selects out and hones ever twitchier athletes, and twitchier athletes refined for the modern game push the intensity further and further out into space. Soft tissues don't seem to be built for this: When I see a video online of the next gravity-defying 17-year-old phenom, the second or third thought in my head, soon after oh hell yeah dude hell yeah, is that kid's ligaments are going to dissolve before he hits 30.
Baseball has run into a similar tissue issue with pitchers, and the sport has changed because of it, not just in the way players are trained and used at just about every level, but in the ways that rosters are built and games are managed. Optimization seems to be tugging basketball toward a similar inflection point. If this feels like a lot to pull out of a single lousy Thursday, let us return to Steve Kerr, who says that his team's trainers "believe the wear and tear, the speed, the pace, the mileage, it's all factoring into these injuries." For that matter, let us consider the actions of the league itself, which is reportedly launching what Shams Charania described as "a league-wide biomechanics assessment program," presumably so that Adam Silver can come back a year from now and say that actually everything is fine.
The shape of this season is starting to take on an unpleasant familiarity: It has started to feel common and normal for a third of the league's star players to be down at a time. I don't even bother to hope, most nights, that a given game will feature two fully healthy rotations. It's a grim an unexpected perk of League Pass, that you can hunt around for whichever matchup features two teams that simply have most of their guys. I would far rather watch the healthy Portland Trail Blazers than the hobbled Los Angeles Lakers, however comparatively unserious the former might be.
To Kerr, the solution is in the schedule. If they can't smear an 82-game schedule over a nine-month regular season, they can simply decrease the number of games squeezed into the current six-month one. "Not only is there no recovery time, there's no practice time," he said Tuesday. "We're not getting any practice time, and the wear and tear is there anyway, because it's the accumulation of all those games, and the speed and the pace and mileage and everything else." I have hated the shortened-season idea for a long time, because I have been a hoops fan for decades and I prefer more basketball to less basketball. Lately I can feel myself coming around to Kerr's way of thinking.
It's significant that I am more receptive to this idea now that my team is approximately as bad as it is possible for a professional team to be. The games are insanely bad, and I hate watching them, and so naturally I would not feel bad if there were fewer of them. If my team were really good—if my team had Nikola Jokic or Giannis Antetokounmpo or Victor Wembanyama—I'm sure I would like for them to be playing a basketball game on my television every single night. Soft tissues might do for the broader audience what rooting for a quarter-assed joke of an organization has done for me. Playing this way, at this pace, under these conditions, is shredding the cool players. Games without cool players are very often junk. If I'm tuning in on a Thursday night, it is not ever to see what Jock Landale can do in the role of Jaren Jackson Jr. Decades of watching the sport have taught me that I will sit still for any style of basketball, so long as it is being played by the world's best. If the best players are doomed to spend a quarter of every season in street clothes, I'm happy to watch something else.
