This NBA season has been riddled with injuries. Guys like Steph Curry, Anthony Davis, LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Paul George, and Zion Williamson all make up a long list of players that have missed time with injury.
While injuries are a part of every season, it seems like the top players are missing more and more games these days.
It’s enough to where the league itself is getting worried about it, and Adam Silver couldn’t help but address it in a chat with the media on Wednesday.
(via ESPN)
“I’m not standing here saying I have a great solution,” Silver said at a news conference in midtown Manhattan following this week’s two-day meeting of the Board of Governors. “Part of the issue is injuries. One of the things we have focused on at the league office and we’re spending — we had begun to spend a lot of time on pre-pandemic — are there things we can do in terms of sharing information, resources around the league to improve best practices, rehabilitation?”
“The other way we can get at it, in terms of player participation, is creating other incentives. The play-in tournament, I thought, was a beginning of creating renewed incentives for teams to remain competitive and be fighting for playoff position. It might be through in-season tournaments and changes in format where we can get at it.”
Apparently, Silver has even been considering shortening the number of games in a season.
“I also have said in the past, if we have too many games, that’s something we should look at as well,” Silver said. “It’s something, as we sit down and we’re looking at new media deals and looking at a new collective bargaining agreement, we will be studying. There wasn’t any banging of the table or anything like that. From my discussions with players, they recognize it’s an issue, too. The style of the game has changed in terms of the impact on their bodies. I think we’ve got to constantly assess and look at a marketplace going forward and say, what’s the best way to present our product and over how long a season?”
The absence of key players has seen a sharp increase in recent years. Besides many suffering from injuries, there are a lot who have missed time due to disagreements with their own teams, like Ben Simmons and James Harden.
Whatever the case, the growing trend proves that players don’t mind missing games — and that’s something the league aims to fix.
We don’t yet know what kind of action Silver and the NBA will try first, but we have no reason to doubt they won’t find some kind of solution, just like they have for countless issues before.
