The shape of things to come

The NBA's spike in late-season injuries isn't recency bias, it's routine.

Recency is up there with narrative as one of basketball’s bad words. Recency bias, mostly, but also taking things to be true and solid based on a promising stretch of play, somebody’s spoken intentions, a team that has no business playing so well excelling — the list for what counts as things not to count, long and loaded. To believe in their veracity like tempting fate.

When is it okay to trust recency to be illuminating something true? Is it the feeling that follows along with facts, that springs from the gut but pulls information from the brain? Experience, then. Recency founded in examples that came before, patterns of proof. When I hear, day after day then week after week, about injuries mounting in the NBA, and follow that hunch to the injury report to note that yes, there was something there, 22 out of 30 teams are currently reporting two or more injuries. It seemed like a lot because it is a lot, wasn’t a case of hearing about three injuries in a row and thinking, That’s a lot. Like pigeons wheeling in formation between buildings: just because the sight of 20 or more flocking in Rorschach formations, rolling and snapping through choreographed directional changes, has grown dull to us from seeing it so often doesn’t make it any less dramatic. It’s still a lot of birds.

Another way to think about recency is fresh. A fresh tear to the radial collateral ligament in Trae Young’s pinkie finger, a fresh incision to remove part of a herniated disc in Ben Simmons’ spine. The sprain to Alperen Sengun’s right ankle, a deep rent in the labrum tissue band of Bennedict Mathurin’s right shoulder, an incision to repair what’s fractured in Russell Westbrook’s left hand, a severance of Colin Castleton’s right wrist, cutting open Karl-Anthony Towns’ left knee to knit together the snaking tear in his meniscus, Chris Boucher’s MCL, snapping.

Photo by Rob Carr

Injuries in the NBA are so immediate, we have a real-time front row seat and then countless options for replay at varying speeds and angles. The recency in them runs from startling to nauseating, but it can shake us out of the lull that bodies in motion in basketball brings on. When we see the body and not the person, moreover, the body as an enduring whole effortlessly moving through space and not by function of its infinitesimal parts, working in tandem and near-constant duress. Recency, it strikes me, becomes rare as it is important. An active framing instead of a passive bias. Urgency, as a mode of thought.

---

Think of the usual ways we anticipate an NBA season to take and change shape. For teams to gain momentum as a season goes on, others to lose it. For athletes to put the disparate pieces of their own improving skills together and take a leap, for others to click together as a team. When long afternoons of summer fade into regimented days of practice, workouts, travel, games; suntans shed for skin that loses its burnish but stretches taut over expertly conditioned muscles. These are the rhythms we know, the repetitions we are happy to follow.

It seems strange to consider injuries aberrations to an NBA season, given their reliability season over season and the imposing conditions of a season itself. As Henry Abbott highlighted in his newsletter this week, a 2018 study by Ph.D. researcher Melanie Lewis found 56.8% of players experienced an injury over a three season period. In 2012-2013 it was 272 out of 479, the following season 272, and the next, 272. These numbers have ticked up since her target years. In 2020 Sportrac recorded 373 injuries, 411 in 2021, 388 in 2022, and 380 last season. These numbers account for players experiencing season-ending injuries and guys who missed one game, because my point isn’t severity, or recurrence, as much as it is surprise. That we don’t account for injuries to change the shape of a season like basketball’s other familiar beats.

We’ve spent entire seasons in holding patterns that come to look like the shape of Ben Simmons’ back, Anthony Davis’ ankle, or the mass of muscles that make up Kawhi Leonard’s quadriceps. Have learned the function of ligaments in strangers that we had no interest prior to the workings of in our own bodies, and to such an intimate degree that there are pundits I can picture tracing, gentle and slow, the musculoskeletal map of certain athletes onto an unsuspecting lovers’ skin.

We treat injuries intimately, but still treat them as anomalies.

---

Weather is a good example.

It determines our days down to what clothes we’re pulling on our bodies, sometimes in the tender tumble of half-awake. Fumbling legs through requisite chutes of fabric, thrusting arms into sleeves. Prepping ourselves to be taken in by it the second we step outside and then, depending what the weather’s doing, bracing against it or throwing ourselves open to it. Our energy can be sapped by it, a productive morning sagging in time with the low, grey clouds of March rolling in; an evening out inverted because of rain in sheets, rain turned to sleet, or wind you seem to owe money to.

In the day-to-day we’ve learned to ignore it or work with it, in the grand scheme we’re falling short. The shape of what’s to come looking worse than what we imagined, what, even, we’d once predicted, when meanwhile we’ve treated the daily proof, first, as novel, then inconsistent, now as routine.

---

The shape of the last few seasons have been defined by their absences. In the grand scheme this has looked like talking about the teams missing from playoff contention, why they fell out early or never got there at all.

Jamal Murray tore his ACL in April 2021, Nikola Jokic held the Nuggets in as long as he could but they went down in the semi-finals. The same postseason saw short runs from the Celtics, the Jazz (pre Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert split), the Bucks. The Lakers missed it entirely in 2022, the Warriors won’t be there this year. When postseasons are absent teams we think of as deserving to be there, we most often trace the root cause to myriad technical faults or lack of competitive spirit, rather than the absence of their best people.

Why I started to think of injuries at all was in picturing the playoffs without the major players who’ve shaped this season, picturing blanked out silhouettes in gameplay where their bodies would have been. The Clippers without Westbrook as human cyclone, the Wolves without Towns’ knack for switching from spot-up outside shooter to grinning defensive teeth in fluid transition, the Sixers without Joel Embiid hulking and sulking, in complete control over the emotional velocity of a game.

I pictured the parts of the many players who are currently injured and out, these broken, snapped or badly bruised pieces, looming over their respective teams. How we tend to reroute our imaginary trajectories for teams in an instant, plugging in this person here or this skill there, to address the deficit, but how the deficit, in life and the bodies hurt, is going to take so much longer to repair, heal, to fill in.

---

When the Lakers won in the Bubble it came with an asterisk to some, that it wasn’t a real title given the circumstances (what about those circumstances — the world coming apart, anxiety as a steady-state, total isolation from the barest comforts of home and any semblance of routine — proved less than difficult, still, I’m not sure).

What’s more realistic is revising how we weigh the validity of any title, certainly recently.

If the hardest thing, given the numbers, has become staying healthy through the NBA’s 82 game regular season and the months of postseason beyond, then don’t all Championships come with an asterisk? Footnotes of which players on which teams were out, who on the winning team was healthy, who “played through injury” (even when we use this language, it abstracts the injury — you don’t play through injury, you compete with it hanging around and gnawing at your neck), and the injuries every person had. Our expectation is for perfect, unmarred seasons, where everyone competes in each game and the competition stays that way until the last game of the Finals, ideally the 7th (since 1952, there have only been 19 of those). When has this ever happened? Given that, why is it the expectation? 

---

The team that flies in the face of all this are the Heat. Who, in their last seasons, seem to perform better the more their injuries pile up and who we now treat as dubious unless they’re bruised, battered, and bandaged up. We scoff at a healthy Heat but wonder out loud, with real awe, What this shorthanded and demonstratively hurt team can do.

---

The expectation as confirmation model in the NBA is a funny one. Adam Silver says players don’t need to rest as much, that load management is no longer backed by scientific data, and we take it to be true. Load management, all along and as any frustrated sports physiologist will tell you, is a series of practices and protocols to fit a specific athlete. The success comes in the specialization, not the catchall. Some athletes, with load (games, workouts) abruptly lessened, will face risk of an immediate injury the next time they set foot on the court because they’re coming back cold. Others need the recovery sitting out the second night of a back-to-back will bring. Per Lewis’ findings, all face a slight uptick in injury for every season they stay in the league beyond its average (4.9 years).

The point has never been the blanket success of a by nature nuanced practice, it’s about autonomy. But load management sounds better than autonomy as a simultaneous buzzword and target for blame from fans upset they’re not going to see their favourite player.

During All-Star weekend, Silver also said injuries were down. A few days into the following week they started to rise to what’s been the routine average across the last four seasons. 

---

Basketball exists in its promise of excess, not the assurance of absences, which is perhaps why we can so eagerly and willingly suspend our sense of reality within it. The standard is pure optimism.

I’m an optimist, and still I treat most days as a lucky tally of the things I was able to do; the weeks, months and years those days form into as a gradual expansion of self. I try to be realistic. Even when I get my hopes up, they’re tethered to experience, to things I can trust or stretch to be true. NBA basketball is the inverse, and an expanding inverse. Every season, we expect more than the one before it. We are benevolent, see only promise, raise our standards stratospheric. I’m not sure if it can constitute as delusion when it’s believed so fully, by so many — but I suppose this is also the basis for cults.

Can we borrow from basketball thinking to satisfy gaps in our low moments, shape-shift to fill, knit things together like the body will appear to do from scratch as it heals? Can we borrow back into basketball a better understanding that these bodies in motion are finite, and when they break we can do better than blurring them into a human-shaped negative?

Bodies are finite, often best served by recency. It’s a fine bias to have when interrogating occupational danger and harm. To not blur out the shape of things so much that we lose integrity, in structure or our sense of perspective.