You’re reading The Sporting Scene, Louisa Thomas’s weekly look at the world of sports.The 2025-26 season began, more or less, a few minutes into the last game of the 2024-25 season, during Game Seven of the N.B.A. Finals, when Tyrese Haliburton, the Indiana Pacers star, stood above the arc with the ball, planted his right foot as he began to drive, and then sprawled to the ground. As the Oklahoma City Thunder scooped up the ball and raced past Haliburton, who lay face down, he pounded the ground. Haliburton, already dealing with a calf strain, had torn his Achilles tendon. Without him, the Pacers didn’t stand a chance. The game—and the season—was effectively over.At the time he was injured, in June, Haliburton was playing in his ninety-sixth game since the season began. After the injury, it’s unlikely that he’ll play in any games this season at all. The impact of his injury has been devastating to the Pacers’ prospects, and he’s hardly the only key player on the team to miss significant time so far, with disastrous results. The Pacers went from winning the Eastern Conference this past summer to starting this season with a dismal 4–16 record.Other teams can tell similar, if less dramatic, stories. Jayson Tatum, of the defending-champion Boston Celtics, tore his Achilles in the final minutes of an intense playoff game against the New York Knicks last season, ruining his team’s hopes of a repeat. There’s a small chance that he’ll return this spring, but in the off-season the Celtics blew up its core of expensive veteran players anyway, acknowledging that their hopes of winning this season were wrecked. The Houston Rockets made a splashy trade for Kevin Durant in July, hoping to contend for a championship this go-around, before their starting point guard, Fred VanVleet, went down with a torn A.C.L. in September. LeBron James did not play in the Los Angeles Lakers’ opening game while suffering from sciatica, his first time missing the start of the season in twenty-three years, and was off the court until mid-November. The Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo rampaged through the first few weeks before injuring his groin. The San Antonio Spurs’ miraculously long and skilled young Frenchman, Victor Wembanyama, who electrified the league at the start of the season, is now missing time with a calf strain. Several other star players, including Anthony Davis and Ja Morant, have also been out with strained calves. On Wednesday, the Golden State Warriors’ Stephen Curry hobbled to the locker room after a series of collisions and is expected to miss at least a week with a bruised quad. And so on.Injuries happen, especially when one player crashes into another at high speeds, as Curry did. But injuries right now are happening at an alarming rate—particularly those that involve trauma to muscles, ligaments, and tendons. Last season was one of the most injury-marred seasons in N.B.A. history. According to the athletic trainer Jeff Stotts, who tracks injury data, players missed around sixty-five hundred games with injuries—the highest in nearly twenty years, not counting the COVID seasons. The first month and a half of this season has been just as bad. The difference is that such a high proportion of stars—defined in this case as a player who has made an All-Star or All-N.B.A. team at least once in the past three seasons—have been affected by soft-tissue injuries. Stars have already missed more than two hundred games between them. It is the story of the season so far: on any given night, nearly half the league’s best and most well-known players are sitting on the bench, in street clothes.And yet the games so far this season have been thrilling: dramatic, high-quality, fun, fast. Really fast. According to ESPN Research, the average pace of play is the fastest it has been in nearly forty years. And players are running farther and faster, on average, than at any point since player tracking began, in 2013-14. It’s easy to see, and to understand why. For years, teams across the league developed better and better offenses. Shot selections became increasingly efficient. More and more players developed deep three-point shots, and were willing to take them. Coaches had a better understanding of how to manipulate space and achieve favorable defensive mismatches, often by having players cut quickly across the floor. Teams became adept at running out in transition, flying to beat the opponent down the floor. Now teams are responding by putting a bigger emphasis on defense, playing with a throttling full-court intensity. Last year, the Pacers were at the forefront of this shift. They contested everything—tipping balls, sneaking in for steals, trying to drive players out of bounds. Certain role players, deep on the bench, earned minutes during the playoffs by largely wearing out the opposing teams’ best players. The Pacers rode that strategy all the way to the Finals, where they met another team, the Thunder, whose defense was even better—and they played fast, too.Others noticed. Teams are now pressing more and more, hoping to cause turnovers and discombobulate offenses. They are picking up ball handlers early, sometimes trapping and harassing them in the backcourt. They’re disrupting passing lanes and leaning in for steals. They’re flying out past the arc to fend off three-point shots, and then diving into the paint to disrupt drives. They’re cutting back and forth, crashing through and over people, trying to outplay offenses that are trying to outsmart them by hunting better matchups. Part of the allure of these more vigorous tactics is that (cheaper) role players can meaningfully contribute to the organized chaos. In fact, they have to: the approach often requires quicker substitutions and deeper rotations. Playing with that kind of intensity is exhausting.It’s exhausting for offenses, too. That’s a large part of the point. And yet offenses are scoring more than ever. The over-all offensive rating of the league is higher than it has ever been. Teams are shooting threes at high rates—but they’re also working hard close to the basket, no longer conceding offensive rebounds in order to get back on defense and using new methods to try to limit potential fast breaks while still trying to score. And more fouls are being called, leading to more free throws, perhaps incentivizing teams to drive to the basket more often in pursuit of those calls. Different teams are taking different approaches based on their personnel: the Denver Nuggets, with Nikola Jokić at the helm, whip the ball around; the Rockets, lacking a fulcrum in the backcourt but blessed with size, crash the boards. The result, either way, is the same around much of the league: high effort all over the court.This, needless to say, is great for the game—right up until someone’s hamstring pops. It doesn’t take an official commission of medical experts to conclude that exhausted, overextended bodies are more vulnerable to injuries, and that all the accelerations and decelerations and changing directions that N.B.A. players do today, even compared with just a few years ago, take a toll on tired joints. “Across the league, everybody understands now that [it’s] just easier to score if you can beat the opponent down the floor, get out in transition,” the Golden State Warriors’ coach, Steve Kerr, said recently. “But, when everybody’s doing that, the games are much higher-paced. . . . Everyone has to cover out to twenty-five feet because everybody can shoot threes. So, we have all the data. Players are running faster and further than ever before. And so, we’re trying to do the best we can to protect them, but we basically have a game every other night. And it’s not an easy thing to do.”Could it be that what’s made the game so fun to watch is related to the injury crisis? Two years ago, back when teams routinely rested their healthy star players during games, the N.B.A. responded by instituting a player-participation policy that highly incentivizes star players to play, and that in some cases penalizes them, or their teams, when they don’t. As the next television-contract negotiations approached, the league wanted to be able to promise broadcasters they were delivering the best, or at least the most popular, product to audiences, as often as possible. For a year, it kind of worked. But maybe it was also self-defeating. It has become obvious to many inside and outside the game that players can’t sustain the level of athleticism the game now demands throughout an eighty-two-game season, let alone tacking on a long post-season run. Instead of seeing stars more often, we’re seeing them less. The league has finessed the schedule to reduce the rate of back-to-back games, but there are limits to what can be done in a tightly packed season, and there’s little hope that the league would be willing to shorten it. “The tricky part is . . . everyone, all the constituents, would have to agree to take less revenue,” Kerr said. “In 2025, in America, good luck in any industry.” He went on, “Imagine, you know, some big company saying, ‘You know what? We’re not as concerned about our stock price. We’re actually concerned with employing people, and giving people a stable job, and making our product better.’ . . . That’s not happening. We know that.”Would a shorter season solve the problem? Maybe, or maybe not. The only sure thing is that every intervention has unexpected consequences. And, since it’s about as likely to happen as the Washington Wizards winning this year’s title, it’s futile to wonder. And there are other factors. Injuries typically spike not only at the end of the season, with the accumulation of wear and tear, but also at the start of the season, even when bodies should be more rested. It’s possible that a longer preseason, to acclimate bodies to the rigors of competitive games, could help. Or that players need to change their approach to off-season training to account for the quick lateral movements that can lead to acute injuries, or that team trainers need to be more prophylactic and smarter about understanding the way the body compensates for instabilities. (Want to avoid knee problems? Read “Ballistic,” by Henry Abbott, and check your hips.) It might also be that teams need to figure out when to take their foot off the gas, in order to pace themselves for the long season. That’s not what anyone wants, of course—but the kind of game that everyone wants may not be sustainable for very long. ♦