"Number of injuries not high this season" says David Stern - NBA Update
Before the start of this condensed NBA season, in which the number of regular season games were reduced to 66, many predicted that the graph of injuries will be a lot steeper than the earlier seasons, because of the tight schedule
and less time to recuperate for the players.
And it turned out to be true.
One half of the season has passed and during this period, almost every player from every team has missed a game or two due to some sort of an injury. Chicago Bulls star, Derrick Rose, the reigning MVP, who did not miss more than
six games in his first two seasons has already missed more than ten games so far and that number can go up high in the coming times too. So has been the case with LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard and the list goes on.
However, NBA Commissioner David Stern doesn’t thinks that the compressed season has led to more injuries. According to him, the figure is roughly the same as last year.
“I must say, I’ve looked at it recently, and I would say that the number of injuries, as we get it from the reports of the trainers and the discussion with the doctors, is about the same as the same period last year,” Stern said.
“The number of games lost is up slightly because teams are being smarter in their own ways, and competitively”
Stern admitted that players have missed more games due to injuries than they would in a normal season, but offered a logical explanation for that.
“Basically, when your guy rolls an ankle and is out a week, he used to miss two or three games, but with the condensed schedule he misses four or five. The injury didn’t change, the time to heal didn’t change, only the schedule
did”.
Before the start of the shortened season, it was expected that veterans in the league would suffer the most from the busy schedule, because of their fragile legs, however fortunately, there has not been any serious injury to any
of the veterans.
The ratio of young player missing the games to older ones is pretty high, so it proves that the condensed season has nothing to do with the injuries. Hopefully the trend would continue and the next few months don’t see many injuries.
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