You can turn soft tissue into hard by adding water. It’s that simple.

Players are playing more than ever before due to AAU and international play. Also, players today are more athletic, and the game requires a lot more cutting and running than previous eras. With these factors combined, the rise in soft tissue injuries makes sense.

Teams are going to have to accept it’s in their best interest to play their stars closer to 28 mins instead of 36

Said this in another comment. I wish I could find the video again that was released shortly after the playoffs last year. But there’s a theory that as the game has spaced out the type of movements and stress it puts on the body has lead to this type of injury being more prevalent. So the options are seemingly to let the injuries happen, shorten the season, or religislate the game. I think shortening the season is unfortunately inevitable. But it can’t be for a while.

Though I guess the only big loss to a shorter season would be the all time stat records. Yes it’s less basketball but with fewer games hopefully they can have teams playing every other day. Get rid of back to backs but also no more 3 days off.

The Great Soft Tissue Epidemic of 2026 

Hot take

If they actually care about health over profits, they’d support reducing games and salaries.

If you want to keep the increased revenue that comes with this many games, you accept the risks involved.

If the money is more valuable to you than your health, that’s no one’s problem but your own.

They’re going to add another bs tournament and increase games before doing anything to address player health/reducing games.

Remember when the NBA was supposed to eliminate back to backs?

I’m asking this sincerely, has anyone shown the numbers on number of soft tissue injuries by year?

I feel like people just accept that more are happening as fact but I feel like the perception that theres been an increase might just be that its hit bigger names than usual. So I’m curious if anyone has the numbers

I think teams are just being overly cautious after what happened in game 7 and btw I’m still sad about that. 

Get rid of back to backs.

Shorten games to 40 min.

Shorten season to 60 games.

I think if you do one of the above you’ll not see as many injuries.

Adam Silver doesn’t care, he’s more interested in NBA Europe and expansion. Players should go on strike but they don’t care enough either.

Why is every NBA team practicing at the 49ers faciliites?

The thing that is ignored is that back in the 80s and 90s guys were getting hurt too. They just got handed pills or shots in the locker room and played through it. Same with the NFL. They’d just shoot you up with painkillers and send you back out there.

I mean, yeah, they should. Which is one reason why the NBPA should absolutely care about postseason award eligibility, and should be insistent that it must be removed. Because giving guys potentially tens of millions of dollars worth of incentives to play hurt is obviously bad when there are so many soft tissue injuries. 

One theory I heard was that it is footwear related. Players today are growing up and developing with these super-cushioned shoes that are really comfy but don’t provide the same support and response that less cushioned shoes of yesteryear. From pre-teen age, they’re wrapped in foamposites / cloadfoam / CX foam and they’re simply not developing the same with their muscles, tendons, and ligaments. Unfortunately if true, we’re going to see decades more of increased soft tissue damage until players in their formative years get more suitable footwear.

Adam Silver will do anything to not have to address this or 82 games and yall eat it up because of your resentment for the player empowerment generation from a decade ago and the emotional schaudenfraude you get from finally being able to make 36 year old Kawhi play a lot of games.

There were 13-14 Achilles and ACL tears last season which I’m pretty sure is comfortably the most we’ve ever seen.

And it’s not like Shai Jokic or Wemby are super safe either. All of them are one ankle turn away from being ineligible too. If most of your top players and MVP candidates are struggling to play 80% of games then maybe there’s something else that needs to be addressed

Is it happening more? Or is it a case of awareness skewing the numbers? MRIs werent even used regularly until the mid 90s amd were never used as much as they are now. Even in the 2000s, an MRI cost way more than it does now. And that considered how much less a dollar is worth today based on housing cost

KG and Pierce had an amazing take on this a while back.

The easiest fix is simply slowing the games down by allowing players to actually play defense, and make scoring harder. 

I think it’s the medicinal practice throughout the league. Guys get calf strains and hamstring strains, then get juiced up with cortisone and pain killers to keep playing. The second they push 100% on a muscle that can’t give 100, the strain goes on ligaments and tendons and they pop.

They have a blue pill for that

We see this in football as well. Players are more athletic than ever which leads to more injuries.

Sure seems like the new inefficiency is transition will always be more efficient than half court offense. Pace seems to be too fast. But i guess just speculation.

Edit: Also this year is a bit of an outlier, no? The past couple seasons weren’t this bad? Could just be that. But might not be.

Relevant pfp

Couldn’t coaches also just use more of their players? Every team has a 15 man roster, but teams will usually play maybe 10 or so guys each night, and less than that in the playoffs.

What if the league created some kind of penalty for using too few players per game, or a minutes restriction for starters?

Is your lungs soft tissue?

they’ll never do it, but reduce the bonus for the shot beyond the arc from 50% to something like 20% and the mad dashes to close out for everyone, even 7 footers, on every possession will decrease…

The NBA is in no way alarmed by award eligibility, Silver was pretty clear on that a few weeks ago. The NBPA is, but it’s their job to fight for the players on all fronts and going on about awards doesn’t prevent them from also looking into injury-related issues.

They could fix a lot of injuries within the game if they started officiating it differently/correctly

Amazing journalism, glad it was posted. I loved the in depth analysis.

Turns if all the MVP candidate haven’t played more than 70 games it probably means that playing 65 games isn’t the floor for mvp candidate it’s more like just like 5 games below the average for MVP level players to get to play.

The NBA media ecosystem is such a monoculture. It’s 1 person saying something than it filters to everyone else and more suddenly the 65 game rule is a problem I need to read or hear about daily. I can assure NBA media, I literally don’t care if a guy played 55 games and now can’t be all NBA.

Players wouldn’t allow reduced games because it means lower pay and looking like a bitch to their peers.

Hot take - to make the pacing slower and help with thewe injury issues, bring back 24 second shot clock after an offensive rebound.

There were “freedom of movement” rules put in place for the 2018-19 season that boosted offensive output considerably, and I think it had the unintended effect of leading to all these soft tissue injuries. Just take us back to the ruleset that the dynastic Warriors were excelling under and we’d still have a plenty of offense. In other words, bring back defense to slow things down and the injuries will cease to be an excessive problem.

I think an overlooked change of rule that may be adding to the soft tissue epidemic is the change of the shot clock from 24 to 14 seconds when you get an offensive rebound. Speeds up the pace of the game a lot more with more possessions.

Kills me that like every issue the league has could be eliminated by just removing b2bs

I guess lungs are considered soft tissues

Lmao Luka was still playing despite holding onto his fucking leg for ten minutes+. Garbage time should have started at the half.

What a melodramatic title. The league has had injuries forever. Guys who are super athletic get soft tissue injuries. Who cares if your favorite hundred millionaire misses out in a few more million because he got hurt? I thought the popular thing was to hate the uber rich? Not if they basketball good though?

We know we know. The league is soft.

Luka pulls a hammy and now its an epidemic? God the nba media is such a bunch of click bait bumbs.

NBA pace was much higher in the 60’s and 70’s and they did just fine. Calling it an “epidemic” because Luka re-injured his hamstring is ridiculous.