Injuries still suck
And they force us to keep writing about them at this very early juncture of the 2024-25 NBA season
It was just a few Tuesday Newsletter Extravaganzas ago that I made the rather obvious but designed-to-be cathartic declaration that Injuries Suck.
Sadly it has to be shouted again so soon because there has been no letup (or catharsis) from the preseason deluge of dispiriting health bulletins.
Just since that Oct. 9 piece ...
🏀 Oklahoma City lost Isaiah Hartenstein (fractured hand) for five to six weeks.
🏀 Cleveland lost Max Strus (hip) for at least six weeks.
🏀 Indiana's James Wiseman sustained a season-ending Achilles tear.
🏀 New Orleans lost Dejounte Murray (fractured hand) just one game into Murray's Pelicans career.
🏀 Memphis had to hold Ja Morant (thigh) out of Monday's home loss to Chicago.
🏀 Golden State announced that Stephen Curry (ankle) and De'Anthony Melton (back) will miss at least two games each before their next re-evaluations.
🏀 Atlanta's Bogdan Bogdanović (hamstring) was ruled out for at least four weeks after what was termed "a non-surgical procedure."
🏀 Washington has lost Kyle Kuzma indefinitely thanks to a right groin strain.
All of the above, of course, lands on top of the ongoing wait for various stars — notables include Philadelphia's Joel Embiid (knee) and Paul George (knee), Milwaukee's Khris Middleton (ankles), Boston's Kristaps Porziņģis (foot) and the LA Clippers' Kawhi Leonard (knee) — who have yet to appear in a game this season.
And all of the above, furthermore, has to be separated from the utterly devastating scenes Monday night in Dallas, when Utah's Taylor Hendricks went down with no contact after suffering a gruesome fractured tibia and ankle dislocation in his right leg. It was one of the worst injury scenes I've ever seen in person in my 30-plus seasons of working NBA games and, frankly, it's impossible not to remain shaken when you remember that poor Hendricks is just 20 and when you hear people say — over and over and rightly so — that you do not want to watch a replay under any circumstances if you can avoid it.
I realize that merely listing and lamenting injuries does little good. There isn't a team in the NBA or a decision-maker in the league office who doesn't A) dream of the day we see fewer, B) hunger for faster advancement in the complicated world of injury prevention practices and C) concede that freakish bad luck will cause some injuries no matter what steps are taken to mitigate them.
All that said ...
I have been staying in touch with noted NBA injury tracker Jeff Stotts of In Street Clothes because the amount of October injuries has undoubtedly "seemed" high to an unscientific scribe like me. Stotts' data regrettably backs up such premonitions.
Stotts actually wound up recording only 111 separate injuries during the October 2024 preseason compared to 119 in October 2023 ... but then the real games started.
During the first six days of the 2023-24 campaign: Stotts logged 118 man-games lost leaguewise in a span of 40 games.
During the first six days of the 2024-25 campaign leading into Monday's play: 151 man-games lost in 41 games.
"It's a confounding issue," Stotts said. "I don’t think there is one singular cause. I think it's a multitude of factors from offseason approach to practice methods.
"I also still believe the pace-and-space era has taken a major toll on players' bodies. Every position is now asked to cover more ground and this can be difficult — especially for bigs. It leaves players vulnerable to injury."
I personally want to believe, as stated pretty much every time we do an injuries piece, that simply talking through this stuff helps us all commiserate in some small way. There is likewise some level of recency bias likely at play — what we see in the moment is bound to make us think things have never been worse — but I was determined to re-open the discussion in this Tuesday Newsletter Extravaganza even before what happened to Hendricks.
Only now, presumably a byproduct to some degree of having two sons of my own who are essentially Hendricks' age, I've thought of little else since leaving the arena.
"These are the moments in sports," Jazz coach Will Hardy said postgame, "that suck."
They really, truly do.
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Soccer and the Spurs
Manchester United has sacked another manager and I promise that I am here to discuss it briefly through an NBA lens rather than reacting in Manchester City fan mode (as you might have expected).
It's a topic I've tackled several times and devoted a whole piece to in The New York Times in January 2019: What if the San Antonio Spurs encounter as much trouble — or even half as much trouble — replacing Gregg Popovich as Manchester United has endured trying to move on without world soccer's answer to Pop?
Erik ten Hag was the sixth full-time manager United has employed since Sir Alex Ferguson's retirement after the 2012-13 Premier League season ... following David Moyes, Louis van Gaal, José Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjær and Ralf Rangnick. Newly appointed Rúben Amorim will be the seventh and there have been three interims (Ryan Giggs, Michael Carrick and Ruud van Nistelroy) in that decade-plus as well.
To be clear: There is zero indication that Popovich is going anywhere. He turns 76 in January, true, but he's in just his second season coaching Victor Wembanyama and, based on everything I know, loving it.
And the Wemby Factor is critical here. For the first time since I've been posing this question and wondering aloud about the down-the-road challenges that the Spurs will face launching the post-Pop Era, San Antonio has an undeniable face of the franchise to build around now.
The next Spurs coach will presumably inherit Wemby. They obviously weren't in that position the last time United made a managerial appointment; ten Hag was hired in April 2022.
Numbers Game
🏀 10
Ten teams entered Tuesday's play averaging at least 40 3-point attempts per game ... topped by the Celtics' average of 50.3.
🏀 1
Only one team averaged in 40s last season: Eventual champions Boston at 42.0.
🏀 3
As my pal Keith Smith also noticed Tuesday morning: Only three Eastern Conference teams began the second week of the regular season with a positive point differential: Cleveland (+16.7), Boston (+15.0) and Orlando (+6.2).
🏀 4
The Thunder have won four regular-season games in a row in Denver — including Opening Night last Thursday. The Nuggets started 0-2 at home this season after going 33-8 at Ball Arena last season.
🏀 29
The Lakers, according to this wonderful chart from Sportico's Lev Akabas, lead the league with 29 national TV appearances this season.
🏀 6
Six teams have only one national TV appearance: Portland in the West along with Brooklyn, Charlotte, Detroit, Toronto and Washington.
🏀 50
Orlando's Paolo Banchero on Monday night became this season's first player to post a 50-point game ... two days later than Chicago's Zach LaVine produced last season's first 50-pointer.
🏀 20
There were 20 50-point games last season by 11 players ... led by three each from Philadelphia's Tyrese Maxey, Milwaukee's Giannis Antetokounmpo and Phoenix's Devin Booker.
🏀 2007
Memphis' Zach Edey last week became the first rookie to foul out of his first NBA game since Milwaukee's Yi Jianlian in 2007, according to Stathead and research from loyal subscriber Deven P.
🏀 21
The recent contract extensions signed by Denver's Aaron Gordon (four years, $133 million) and Minnesota's Rudy Gobert (three years, $110 million) took the total of veterans to hash out new deals rather than wait for free agency to 21 since the end of last season, according to ESPN's Bobby Marks.
🏀 8-97
Last Thursday night might have delivered the final edition of TNT's famed Who He Play For? on Inside The NBA (depending on the show's future). I so badly wanted to believe the network when it said Charles Barkley has only answered correctly eight out of the 105 times in show history that he has been asked to name the team that employs the player in question — which certainly sounded plausible — but you need to check the graphic carefully.
🏀 7
Monday's firing of Christie Sides by the Indiana Fever, per The Associated Press' Tim Reynolds, means that seven of the WNBA's 13 franchises have coaching vacancies.
🏀 37
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel's Ira Winderman is on the Miami Heat beat for an unfathomable 37th consecutive season. There are several other active colleagues who have been covering the NBA longer than me but have also taken on other beats and assignments along the way, including NBA.com's Shaun Powell and Steve Aschburner, The Athletic's David Aldridge, The Los Angeles Times' Broderick Turner, Fox Sports' Ric Bucher, Heavy.com's Steve Bulpett, Chicago legend Sam Smith and a trio of writers in my home city of Dallas: The Dallas Morning News' Brad Townsend and the Mavs.com duo of Dwain Price and Eddie Sefko. (Aschburner covered the 1977 All-Star Game in Milwaukee while still in college, Price covered his first NBA game in 1978 … and Turner and I covered our first Lakers game together during the 1991 playoffs when I was still in college.) Hopefully I didn't miss anybody and chapeau to all of you in Season No. 32 for moi. (If I missed anyone who should have been listed … profuse apologies and please let me know so I can honor you in this space next week.)
The Spurs' culture remains intact (same as the Heat), but their edge in global recruiting has been lost as most teams have caught up, and everyone does it now. Pop’s coaching staff probably has the most significant turnover (with Kerr a close second) because of their approach to developing their coaching staff.
Interesting comparison of Spurs and Man U. We used to hear a lot about how well run the Spurs were, but I haven't seen any references to that in the last few years. Do you have a sense of if other teams have simply caught up? Or have they lost a step with so many coaches and staffers graduating to other teams over the years?