Injuries to Jalen Williams and Cason Wallace have already rocked Oklahoma City’s season. Anthony Edwards’ unexpected knee surgery has derailed the fun Minnesota Timberwolves spectacle, maybe for a couple months.
Some of you NBA fans have been messaging me about this topic, worried over whether this is the league’s new status quo. I’d say, with the caveat that there’s always some randomness to who gets hurt and to what degree…probably?
Earlier this week, NBA analyst and Pacers watcher Caitlin Cooper wrote:
It's a week into the season and the NBA is averaging the most possessions per game, shortest average possession length, highest average pickup distance, and most possessions with at least three offensive players crashing in the tracking era. Playing very hard for 82 games!
It’s the intensity. That’s ironic because a cliché complaint about the NBA regular season is the lack of intensity. “Load management” became a byword to the casual sports fan for how the NBA had gotten far too casual. But actually, the main reason we see less of our favorites is that everyone outside of Sacramento is playing so much harder. Load management is mostly an attempt at mitigating the costs of intensity. This isn’t just a basketball problem, but an issue across sports. As actors get better at competing within a game, it changes the game in ways we don’t always love. It’s inevitable and an example of how “progress” doesn’t always progress in the direction of a product we prefer.