If you feel like NBA star players have missed more games than usual this season, you’re not mistaken.
According to Yahoo’s Tom Haberstroh, NBA stars — defined by the league’s participation policy as any player who has made an All-Star or All-NBA team in any of the past three seasons — have already missed more than 200 games due to injury or illness through the first four weeks of the 2025-26 campaign.
That’s a fairly shocking figure, and not just because it’s big and round. Per Haberstroh, it’s more than twice as many games that star players missed for the same reasons at this point in the season as a year ago.
As for the reasons for the increase in absences, a significant portion stems from the alarming number of lower-body injuries suffered by star players throughout the second half and postseason of last year’s campaign. Jayson Tatum, Tyrese Haliburton, and Damian Lillard are each expected to miss most of (if not all of) this season due to Achilles injuries. Meanwhile, Kyrie Irving continues to recover from a torn ACL.
But according to Haberstroh’s data, star player absences would still be up 12 percent from this point two years ago, even if you removed Tatum, Haliburton, Lillard, and Irving from the equation. LeBron James, Paul George, Zion Williamson, Trae Young, Anthony Davis, and Darius Garland have each missed the bulk of the ongoing season with varying injuries. Oklahoma City Thunder swingman Jalen Williams and Miami Heat guard Tyler Herro have yet to make their 2025-26 debuts.
Of the 45 players who currently qualify for “star” status in the NBA, 32 have already missed at least one game this season. That includes San Antonio Spurs third-year big man Victor Wembanyama, whose emergence served as one of the league’s most intriguing storylines before he was recently sidelined for multiple weeks with a calf strain.
While Haberstroh writes that it’s too early to make any sweeping conclusions about the spike in injuries, he also notes that “it follows a larger parallel track of veteran star injuries and increased pace in the league.” As of Tuesday, the league’s average pace sat at 101 possessions per 48 minutes, up nearly two possessions from a season ago and 10 possessions per game more from where it was in 1997.
Although Haberstroh cited at least one silver lining in the form of games missed for all players — not just stars — being slightly down from this point a season ago, he conceded that the recent injury bug among the league’s biggest names is alarming “for a league fighting the image that star players aren’t playing enough.” And that’s also true for the NBA’s media partners, such as NBC, which recently flexed a Spurs game onto national television, only for it to feature a Wembanyama-less team.