This year’s NBA Playoffs have seen more than the usual number of injuries to star players. What’s going on?
I knew it when I saw it. The classic stumble from a sudden forward chase of direction. The grab of the leg, and of course the shouts of agony. And with a torn Achilles of one Jayson Tatum, the possibility of an NBA title repeat by the Boston Celtics went up in flames.
Tatum wasn’t alone. In fact his was the second Achilles tear from this year’s NBA playoffs, the first one being Damian Lillard from the Milwaukee Bucks in the first round. Then in the second round, we saw both Steph Curry and Aaron Gordon go down with similar hamstring injuries. Every round feels more like a battle of attrition than a showcase of elite basketball.
At some point, you have to ask: is this just bad luck… or is something broken in the way we prepare and manage elite basketball players today?
The Trend: Injuries Are Getting Worse
This isn’t just anecdotal. Over the past two decades, injury rates in the NBA have climbed—especially soft tissue injuries like hamstring strains, quad pulls, and calf tweaks. A 17-year study published in the Journal of Athletic Training found that not only are injuries more frequent, but they’re also happening earlier in the season and recurring more often.
During the 2024–2025 postseason, multiple playoff series were affected by these kinds of injuries to role players and star players alike. But maybe there is a clear reason why it’s happening.
Soft Tissue Breakdown: Why It’s Happening More Often
Two high-profile cases this postseason were Steph Curry and Aaron Gordon, both suffering hamstring strains during crucial moments in their series. Both teams would end up losing their second round series.
Soft tissue injuries like these have become increasingly common—and costly.
Why?
- Fatigue is a major contributor. The hamstrings are heavily involved in deceleration, cutting, and sprinting. In fact I refer to them as the “brakes” of the legs. When fatigued, they lose their ability to coordinate force efficiently, leading to strain or worse, a tear.
- Schedule density makes it harder to recover properly. I don’t know what it is. It may be the increased demand to produce a product consistently, but we have seen rest intervals shorten in between games in the playoffs. And with the shorter off days, legs stay heavy, and micro-damage builds up which if not addressed, can lead to an injury.
- Neuromuscular fatigue affects reaction time and joint control. When players get tired, not only do their bodies get slower, their brain and in turn, their reaction times get slower as well. This can lead to mistimed jumps or cuts or in the case of Tatum, a simple forward step turned into a devastating injury.
- Early-season wear-and-tear plays a role. All NBA fans have heard the term “load management.” Well, the NBA is cracking down on load management. So players are forced to play more games and maybe play through minor injuries where damage can add up through the course of a long 82-game season.
Research from Sports Health and The British Journal of Sports Medicine has repeatedly shown that fatigue and poor recovery are primary predictors of soft tissue injury—particularly in high-load sports like basketball, where sprinting, jumping, and stopping create huge eccentric demands on the lower body.
The Doctor Weighs In: Insights from Dr. Raul Canlas
To get a deeper understanding, I spoke with Dr. Raul Canlas, one of the Philippines’ top orthopedic surgeons and a leading voice in sports injury care.
On Modern NBA Play: Dr. Canlas emphasized that the NBA’s faster pace of play compared to the 1990s has placed a higher burden on players’ bodies. “The NBA plays a long grueling 82 game season. The players don’t get enough rest sometimes and this leads to more injuries.” He also noted that the pace of play is much faster nowadays compared to how the game was played in the ‘90s and even up to the 2000s.
According to Second Spectrum data, NBA games have gone from about 90 possessions per team in the ’90s to nearly 100+ today. That’s an exponential increase in ground covered, jumps landed, and collisions absorbed.
On Footwear: He also cited the trend toward low-cut shoes, saying, “This is just my opinion, but I think the low-cut shoes are also a factor especially in the lower leg injuries.” Of course he also acknowledges that something has to give. The ankle needs to have some mobility, and high cut shoes may lead to a stiff ankle which in turn can lead to a more compromised knee. So injuries may simply just shift up towards the knee.
Studies are inconclusive—but the lack of support doesn’t help, especially in situations where ankle or lower leg stability is the last line of defense.
On Load Management: Dr. Canlas also said that when load management started in the NBA, it did help in lessening overuse injuries. But nowadays, with the NBA cracking down on it, “players are really playing more and more games, and it catches up to them in some form down the road”. This was definitely the case for the stars who got injured in this year’s playoffs.
On Achilles Injuries: Discussing the Achilles tears of Lillard and Tatum, Dr. Canlas noted: “Even elite-conditioned athletes can get hurt. Achilles tears often come from a rapid contraction in a compromised position—like planting hard or pushing off in a fatigue-compromised posture.”
As I mentioned also before, fatigue isn’t just physical—it’s also neurological. When your brain is tired, it reacts slower. Your timing and coordination are off. That’s when catastrophic injuries happen.
The Roots of the Problem
Injuries are really a problem, and with the rising case of injuries in the NBA, and how much our local basketball program in the Philippines patterns our game and even our development of athletes to America, we need to investigate what happened, so that we can learn and do better.
AAU Culture and Early Specialization
Many NBA players arrive in the league already beat up. The youth basketball scene in the U.S.—particularly AAU—is built on volume and it really gets crazy. Tournaments with four to five games in a weekend, minimal recovery, and year-round competition with no real offseason. This is a recipe for overuse injuries to develop.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has even acknowledged that American players are “over-gamed and under-trained.” They’re getting reps, yes—but often at the expense of joint health, tissue resilience, and basic movement competency.
By the time they reach the league, they’re explosive but fragile. Their skill is NBA-ready. Their bodies aren’t.
We’re seeing a disturbingly similar trend here in the country. There are so many developmental leagues popping up, and although they are not bad per se, over-eager parents can be overworking our kids by making them play too many games. Games are good to get experience, but we have to remember that an athlete can only do so much in a week and filling up their schedule while forgetting about other forms of developmental training may be doing more harm than good.
The NBA Schedule and Travel Grind
Eighty-two games in six months is a lot. Add to that the cross-country flights, back-to-backs, and even with charter flights, high-tech recovery gear, and elite medical teams, there’s only so much the body can take.
In contrast, you can look to the EuroLeague where teams play fewer games with more recovery time and significantly less travel. Although the EuroLeague does get its fair share of injuries, it’s not close to the numbers the NBA gets.
The average Euro team might take a two-hour flight across the continent. NBA teams are routinely crossing three time zones overnight.
Pace and Style of Play
Like what Dr. Canlas said, the NBA is getting faster every year. This means more possessions per game, more transition, more above-the-rim play, more minutes logged at max intensity. Every movement is more explosive, every landing more violent. And as teams get deeper into the season and the playoffs, the risk for injuries also get bigger.
You can see that our local game is also getting influenced by this as less and less players are posting up and more big men are becoming perimeter-oriented.
Extra Work Culture
Who doesn’t love a hard worker, right? Coaches dream of players who go the extra mile to get better. But are they really getting better by doing more, or are they just simply getting more tired?
Players nowadays are given more and more freedom to “design” their own training programs. This means that outside of team practice and any other team-sanctioned workouts, they often go out and look for their own developmental coaches both for skill work, and strength and conditioning work. In the NBA, this happens often in the off-season, when the team is on break, but locally, this practice happens more often into the season of play.
The idea is noble. You try to do everything you can to get better. But is it the right way to do things? Well, that ultimately will depend on your program. If it has the right balance then it can work. And if you do choose to get “extra work”, make sure your team knows about it. Remember, everything adds up, both good and bad.
Load Management: Theory vs. Execution
The NBA loves the term “load management,” but how often is it truly enforced?
In Europe, teams rotate players more aggressively, minutes are distributed more evenly, and stars are often sat without drama. In the NBA, pressure—from fans, TV deals, and even players themselves—keeps stars on the floor longer than they should be.
Many franchises have access to the best sports science and tracking tools in the world. But good luck telling that to coach Thibs (Tom Thibodeau) of the Knicks who is notorious for keeping his players in the game even if his staff is urging him to rest them.
What Needs to Change?
We are certainly in no position to tell the NBA to change anything. But there have been some rumblings from the players and the people around the league to shorten the season. Even a 70-game season may lower injury rates simply because of less reps. However, I believe this will be difficult to pull off especially with the NBA’s new TV deal.
The AAU program also needs to be revisited. And locally, we have to start being smarter about our kids. I’m not saying that we should stop them from playing sports, but I am saying that we have to be smart about where we enroll our kids. They need to be getting better but at the same time, they need to be getting holistically better as well.
I know this part will sound self-serving, but a proper strength and conditioning program will do wonders for decreasing injury rates. But even a strength and conditioning coach cannot do anything about the amount of games and reps a player goes through on the court. Sometimes, the best thing a strength and conditioning coach can do is to shorten a workout, and stick to the biggest bang for the buck exercises.
We also need to encourage players to have high quality rest in between training bouts. The best way is to get enough sleep, which a lot of players miss out on especially when they spend hours on their devices.
In the end, this isn’t about grit. It’s about math, mechanics, and recovery science.
Today’s players are the most athletic generation in history—but they’re running a marathon at a sprinter’s pace. Until we fix the system, the best basketball of the year will keep getting played without the best players on the floor.
Let’s stop hoping for the best, and start solving the problem.
Banner images from AFP.