NBA stars keep going down.
This week on the Western Conference side of the NBA Cup quarterfinals —the marquee games of the first half of the season so far — both Victor Wembanyama and Devin Booker were sidelined with tissue injuries. The latest top star to be made available for trade, Giannis Antetokounmpo, is out with a calf strain, the two scariest words to GMs across the league right now.
All three of Jayson Tatum, Tyrese Haliburton, and Damian Lillard are out for the season after Achilles’ tears, completely depleting the Eastern Conference.
Following those trend lines, The Athletic’s John Hollinger asked what felt like an obvious question in the headline of his dispatch from New York, where the Knicks prepared to face Orlando in the quarters: “Is the NBA Cup a problem in a road-weary league?”
In the column, Hollinger drew attention to the league’s scheduling for the tournament, which attempts to spotlight the knockout round of the Cup by keeping these games alone on the calendar for four out of eight days. As a result, 28 of 30 teams will play just two games in that span.
Laying out the numbers, Hollinger made the argument that the natural condensing of the latter part of the schedule post-Cup is at least in part to blame for the league’s injury scourge. The problem, Hollinger wrote, is not purely the number of games played but also the inconvenient travel schedule that reduces recovery time and puts more stress on players’ bodies:
“The NBA Cup is complicit here because of the necessary scheduling maneuvers to accommodate all intraconference matchups on certain nights, without back-to-backs preceding them, and then get everybody back to home base in early December. Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to do that by giving everybody short trips.”
The column apparently generated significant attention in the league office.
Early on Thursday, NBA communications chief Mike Bass released a statement with a careful deconstruction of Hollinger’s argument.
“John Hollinger’s premise that the NBA Cup has led to a denser schedule resulting in more player injuries is simply not supported by the data,” he wrote.
The Athletic’s suggestion that an increase in games missed by star players is related to the early-season schedule is inaccurate and misleading. https://t.co/vaZbT9p1pV
Here are the facts: pic.twitter.com/OMhCqrjVz5
— NBA Communications (@NBAPR) December 11, 2025
The league also noted that teams played roughly the same number of games through the first half of December as last season and pre-NBA Cup. The number of injuries “forcing stars to miss games” is also down 25 percent, according to the statement.
If the NBA believed the statement would tamp down the frustration with injuries and star player absences, it did not appear to achieve its goal.
“Six of the nine full lines in this release end in a hyphenated word. That’s exhausting to read…,” DLLS analyst Bobby Karalla wrote on X.
“…just like playing six games in nine days is! The Mavs have averaged five games every nine days so far this season. Averaged! That’s a whole lot of games.”
Reporter and author Yaron Weitzman chided the league’s response as well.
“I understand why the league is sensitive about it, but the NBA’s public pushback to cup criticism is getting annoying,” he wrote.
Perhaps Hollinger could have been more precise around the number of games played, but his broader point about travel and workload has been echoed far and wide. Throughout the season, coaches and players have complained about the clustered structure of the schedule and erratic travel load. Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, as respected a voice as there is in the NBA, has been one of the most prominent critics.
Injury issues were already reaching a breaking point before the introduction of the NBA Cup. New investment from Amazon Prime Video and Emirates has propelled the tournament to even greater prominence.
Even if the league is right about the schedule and injury data, the perception around the NBA and player health is not turning. No matter what it says about Hollinger’s latest work.