What’s up with the rash of muscle, ligament, and tendon injuries that have been keeping guys like Giannis Antetokounmpo and Tyrese Haliburton off the court? We called up a former NBA performance trainer to find out.
ByMatthew Roberson
March 13, 2026
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Michael Houtz; Getty Images
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If you’re an NBA fan in 2026, you’ve probably had this exact experience: You settle onto the couch after a long day, pull up that night’s schedule, and see if there are any matchups that catch your eye. Inevitably, there are one or two games between teams that you genuinely love watching, each roster filled with the kind of uniquely thrilling players that make basketball fandom so titillating.
And then you remember: Wait, half those guys are injured right now.
In today’s NBA, you can’t simply turn on a game and expect to see your favorite players on the court. The modern NBA is just as much about strategic withdrawals and managing injuries as it is about hitting threes and grabbing rebounds. Finicky injuries seemingly bite a new superstar every week. Teams controversially rest healthy players to limit their wear and tear (or boost their chances in the draft lottery), and long-term ailments sometimes keep A-listers on the shelf for the entire season.
This season alone, household names like Giannis Antetokounmpo and Victor Wembanyama have been hampered by nagging calf injuries. Jayson Tatum just returned from his Achilles tear during last year’s playoffs, while Damian Lillard and Tyrese Haliburton have yet to play a single minute thanks to the same injury. Steph Curry is dealing with something colloquially known as “runner’s knee.” Defending champion Jalen Williams and electrifying dunker Ja Morant both sustained leg injuries while driving to the rim. Devin Booker strained a muscle in his hip. Joel Embiid is perennially managing knee problems. Aaron Gordon continues to deal with recurring hamstring strains. So on and so forth.
Getting hurt is an inevitable part of sports, but the types of injuries that have taken out most of the players listed above—soft tissue problems in the leg, often the result of a non-contact play—have become much more prominent. In a December 2025 story for Yahoo! Sports Tom Haberstroh highlighted the increased frequency of calf strains and how they’ve caused more players to miss long stretches of the season, but also how young players, in particular, have been affected. (Reigning MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is one of the few stars whose injury during the 2025-26 season was of the non-leg variety, as he was held out for nine games in February with an abdominal issue. Nikola Jokić missed 16 games with a knee injury too, but that was from a teammate crashing into him, not attrition.)
It’s a troubling reality for the NBA, whose popularity relies on the presence of individual players more than any of the other major American sports leagues. Things get dire when fans can’t comfortably ensure that tuning in for a game—or paying exorbitant prices to attend one in person—will mean getting to watch the best players. As a result, the major talking point of the 2025-26 season has been: how do we fix the NBA?
What’s perhaps most puzzling is that the parameters of the game haven’t changed: An NBA season is still 82 games long, and each game is 48 minutes. That was also true in the 1980s, when players hooped in stiff Converse Weapons and boarded commercial flights to and from games, rarely succumbing to the type of bodily harm that’s keeping today’s All-Stars on the training table. So what is it about the way modern NBA games are played that keeps getting players hurt? It might be just that: modernity.
Aaron Nelson, who works in Performance Healthcare Research & Development for the Utah Jazz, has over 30 years of experience in NBA athletic training. He has a theory for why today’s players are constantly pulling, tweaking, or straining something: The game has gotten too optimized. “The speed of the game has picked up,” Nelson says. During his time working with the Phoenix Suns during the fabled Seven Seconds or Less era, he recalls, the performance staff would leave Gatorades on the scorer’s table for the referees, so they could stay hydrated amid the run-and-gun chaos of coach Mike D’Antoni’s offense. But what was considered fast back then is borderline glacial by today’s standards. The NBA tracks a stat called pace, which measures the number of possessions a team has per 48 minutes. In the 2004-05 season, during which the Suns revolutionized basketball by emphasizing quick shots and a frenetic offense, they led the league with a pace of 97.35. This season, that number would comfortably put them in the bottom third of the league.
With faster pace comes more possessions, which means more trips running up and down the court. And more running means more chances for wear and tear. “It is just like if you go to the gym [and] instead of doing 10 squats, you do 50 squats. You’re going to be more fatigued doing 50,” says Nelson. The league is also full of athletic aliens now. A player with the skillset of Wembanyama, who stands well over seven feet tall and can shoot and dribble like a guard, just did not exist in the olden days. “Guys are jumping higher, and they’re coming down harder,” Nelson says. “I mean, what goes up has to come down.”
According to Nelson, this jump in athleticism can be partly chalked up to player evolution (30 years from now, there could theoretically be a taller, faster Wemby terrorizing the league), which, in hindsight, makes the hulking giants of yesteryear look like they were playing with molasses in their shoes.
“If you take a guy like Karl Malone, a physical specimen, a big strong guy—and there’s big strong guys now, but I would put him up against a lot of these guys now—it is just different,” Nelson says. “The athleticism is a little bit different.” He also notes that a difference in upbringing could be a contributing factor as well. “Guys back then were playing multiple sports. Men and women that have played multiple sports tend to have more success [avoiding injuries]. When you specialize early, it becomes a little bit of an issue.”
Today’s professional basketball ecosystem is largely comprised of kids who grew up playing in the American Athletic Union (AAU), and were set on a clear one-sport track, thrust into highly competitive, basketball-only youth circuits at early ages. Nelson theorizes that ridding children of the movements, athleticism, and muscle memory that comes from playing multiple sports can have debilitating effects on their bodies when they reach adulthood, especially if they’re being asked to play 35-plus minutes of NBA basketball three times a week. The human frame is simply not designed to withstand being this good at basketball. “Why do these bigger injuries happen?” Nelson asks rhetorically. “I don’t know that the body’s gotten there yet, or is able to get there yet.”
While some in-game accidents—like going up for a rebound, landing on someone else’s foot, and spraining an ankle—are impossible to prepare for, there are a few motions that carry inherent injury risk and can be preemptively treated. In the case of Achilles injuries like Tatum and Haliburton’s—which both happened when the players tried to push off from a foot that was positioned behind them—Nelson says that the crucial tendon is like a rubber band, and there is a threshold of stretching, reaching, and moving it that will cause it to tear. But supportive gear like braces, ankle tape, and neoprene compression sleeves can help minimize injuries to several key parts of the body.
Beyond that, according to Nelson, recovery practices like dynamic stretching and extra sleep are crucial to prevent these injuries. “They might be as strong as an ox and have great mobility, but if they’re fatigued and tired, they get in the game and they make a wrong decision,” Nelson says.
Basic communication also plays a huge part in keeping a player on the court. A trainer asking about how a player’s body is feeling—and, most importantly, getting an honest answer in return—is among the most elementary forms of injury mitigation. Even if those conversations aren’t always easy, they can open up a dialogue between player and trainer. “It’s not fighting, but having a conversation with the athlete on what’s best for them and what might work for them,” Nelson explains. “What we might think is best, they might disagree.”
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Tyrese Haliburton (center) has only been able to watch this year after tearing his Achilles during the 2025 NBA FinalsChina Wong/Getty Images
Checking in on health statuses before firing up NBA League Pass is a fairly new habit I’ve formed—one that I only really associate with this decade. In the 2010s, when the concept of “load management” began matriculating through the league, it was still mostly a novelty. Perhaps the most famous example was in 2012, when San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich chose to rest four of his marquee players—Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili, and Danny Green—against LeBron James and the Miami Heat, as the game marked the Spurs’ fifth in less than a week. This caused a ton of backlash in the media and uproar among disgruntled supporters. Then-NBA commissioner David Stern seemed to agree with those fans, fining the Spurs $250,000 for doing “a disservice to the league and our fans.”
Today, the same type of move would cause annoyance and a similar fine, but it’s much less newsworthy. Nelson, who has been around the NBA long enough to remember when the idea of stapling a fully healthy player to the bench was preposterous, has some thoughts. “Sure, guys need to rest,” he says. “They need to recover, but they also have to have the physical capacity to handle a bigger load. They’ve got to be able to run fast, jump high, play 28, 32, 35 minutes a game at that pace. If you’re not able to do it because you’re sitting out of games or you’re sitting out of practices, then your body just can’t handle it.”
Ten years ago, during the 2015-16 season, all five members of the All-NBA First Team played in at least 72 of their team’s 82 games. This year, the league is in real danger of having several marquee players fall short of 65 games, the necessary threshold required to earn a major award (All-NBA, MVP, Rookie of the Year, et cetera). Curry, Antetokounmpo, and James have each already missed enough games to render themselves ineligible for All-NBA honors, ending a five-year run for Steph, nine-year streak for Giannis, and unfathomable 21-year reign for LeBron.
The 65-game rule, put in place in 2023, was specifically designed to prevent tanking. What the league office failed to foresee is how that self-imposed limit would impact players with real injuries, rather than the hypothetical ones teams scheme up when they’re trying to lose on purpose to bolster their chances in the draft lottery. More than ever, the NBA has become a battle of the last men standing. With the playoffs just over a month away, the principle question on everyone’s minds is not related to offense or defense, it’s simply: Which team will be the healthiest?