LAST TEAM STANDING?

 

               OK sports fans, time for a quiz. What do these eight men— Kawhi Leonard, Paul George, Joel Embiid, Ja Morant, Julius Randle, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Chris Paul and Jimmy Butler-- have in common?

               All are National Basketball Association stars and the best players on their teams, or nearly so. And all have missed games due to injury during the current NBA playoffs.

               Some of their absences already have been crucial. The Los Angeles Clippers, minus George for the duration and Leonard for three games, were bounced from the tournament’s first round in five games by the Phoenix Suns, and the Milwaukee Bucks, top seeded in the East, suffered a similar fate to the Miami Heat with Giannis out for two of those games.  Without playmaker Paul for the last four games, the Suns lost in six to the Denver Nuggets in round two.

               More rounds remain so the injury story of this year’s playoffs hasn’t been completed. Many of the games so far have been brilliantly played, with epic individual performances by Butler, Stephen Curry and Devin Booker, among others, but the way things are going the race could be won not by the best team but the last one standing. The NBA season has gotten so tough and grueling that it rivals the National Football League’s in having injuries dictate its outcomes. And instead of looking for ways to limit the damage, the league mostly makes it worse.

               Schedules in our major spectator sports long have been governed more by commerce than by competition, but nowhere has the “more is better” philosophy been more damaging than in the NBA. The league has had a 82-game regular season since the 1967-68 campaign, but the game today is immeasurably faster and rougher than it was then, and the playoffs are longer. First-round playoff series’ used to be best-of-five-games, now they’re best-of-seven like the other three rounds, and this season a six-game “play-in” tourney was added among the seventh-through-10^th-place finishers in the two geographic divisions to determine who made the final eight in each. A winner now could play as many as 30 playoff games, against 28 before. Maybe that’s not a big deal, but it’s not nothing.

               In the NFL, the injury bug bites hardest on the quarterbacks. They’re the most important players on the field but also the most vulnerable, often gazing at receivers downfield while behemoth lineman intent on their demise bear down upon them. It’s a wonder they aren’t hurt more often than they are. In basketball the stars bear the injury brunt because they play more minutes than lesser lights and are more the defenses’ focus.

               Basketballers aren’t bent on mayhem the way footballers are, but the cagers play unpadded—in their underwear, by appearance—and they don’t call the courts “the hardwoods” for nothing. Spectators and photographers sit only a few feet from the side and end lines, adding to the danger. Both effort and intensity increase during the playoffs, and the unwritten but real refs’ dictum to “let the boys play” kicks in. And even an elderly gent like 38-year-old LeBron James is logging 40-minute games during the current go-round.     

               You can’t make any money while the store is closed so the NBA, like our other pro leagues, is loath to cut back on its schedules. It has addressed its injury problem in part by going corporate, legitimizing what it calls “load management.” That means it’s okay for players to sit out games from time to time for no other reason than rest.

 The injured parties here are the fans, who no longer can count on seeing their favorite players when they buy tickets. To find out how often that happens I counted the absences during the just-concluded regular season of the dozen players I considered the league’s best. Embiid, Nikola Jokic, Luca Doncic, Antetokounmpo, Curry, Leonard, James, Kevin Durant, Booker, Morant, Damian Lillard and Butler missed a total of 274 games for rest or injury, with Durant’s 35 the most and Jokic’s 13 the fewest. That works out to about 23 games each, or about 28% of their teams’ schedules.

Other players get hurt, too; 10 seasons ago 28 players appeared in all 82 NBA games but this season the total was 10. The league record for consecutive games was set by A.C. Green, a much-traveled frontcourter, whose streak totaled 1,192 games from 1987 through 2001. That’s way short of the baseball mark of 2,632 games set by Cal Ripken Jr., but it’s just about as remarkable; as Green put it, “Ripken didn’t have to fight off two or three guys every time he went to catch a pop up.”   The NBA’s current streak is 392, held by Mikal Bridges of the Brooklyn Nets, so Green’s mark won’t be topped soon, if ever.

To the question of why all the basketball injuries, the reasons are several. One, of course, is that even with load management the NBA schedule is too long. Another is the increased speed of the game, which ups the stress all around. A third, by me, is the fact that the wealthy pro athlete of today (and just about all NBAers are wealthy, or should be) is a jock in season and out, and probably is working out somewhere when he isn’t playing.

 All proper workout schedules have a rest component, but given the competitiveness of big-time sports few jocks can resist thinking that one more rep, or lap, could be the difference between a starting job and the bench, or somesuch. There’s a thin line between peak fitness and a pulled hamstring,  so all teams and their fans must hope their star’s next step won’t put him on the injured list.