The injured list could win it all four times over
The TrueHoop staff drafts shelved players
BY HENRY ABBOTT
A few months ago, I took my son to his college orientation. They discuss rates: what percentage of first years make it to graduation, what percentage of those get jobs in their field, go to graduate school, or the military. As a parent, it feels good to know your kid is in a river where a huge percentage of boats make it safely to their destination.
If, instead of college, my son made the NBA, I wonder if I’d feel the same way. Income tends to overwhelm our thinking when it comes to making the NBA, but that only goes so far in a field where people almost all get injured, retire young, often carry limps or chronic pain, and tend not to live to old age. (As we recently discussed on the TrueHoop podcast, a lawsuit details Kawhi Leonard’s overwhelming injury history.)
By and large you'll see a lot of shrugging: What could have been done?
That shrug ignores much science. Over the last decade-plus, but especially the last three years, I have explored what we could do to prevent injuries—both in NBA players and in ourselves. The answer is “a lot.” We’ll dig more into all that more as we get closer to May and the release of my book on the topic, Ballistic.
In the meantime, the shrugging is a free pass to the “rub some dirt on it” crowd. All over sports, there are people who care: sports scientists, physical therapists, massage therapists, trainers, kinesiologists, doctors and others hellbent on maximizing health in the NBA. A common story I’ve heard (it’s baked into that Kawhi lawsuit) is that those people’s best efforts tend to run up against not the limits of biology or performance, but into the stiff headwinds of the powers that be.
Sometimes there’s a head coach making $10 million a year who’s paranoid he’ll get fired if the star with the unstable knee doesn’t suit up tonight. Sometimes there’s a GM who stuck his neck out to get the billionaire to sign supermax checks, and he’d like to hurry that star back to the court after surgery over the protests of the training staff. Some teams don’t seem eager to pay for the best preventative treatment. Other times there are disagreements about what’s causing the problem: Is that knee sore because of the way he runs, a hangover from surgery, bad sleep, genetics, shoes or something else?
Through all that, two things are clear:
The current system isn’t working.
The powers that be have played a big role in getting us here.
The other day I printed out the league’s official injury report: It was 10 pages long. We’re just a few weeks into the NBA season. Some statistics show that NBA injuries are up 35 percent this season.
It’s a little hard to see and feel something that happens to a hundred people, especially when you watch one team. I’m a Blazers fan—they’re not too injured right now, so it’s easy to feel everything is okay. But if you’re a Raptors fan, a Pelicans fan, a Hawks fan … you know.
We toyed with the idea of creating a giant infographic. Then it struck me that there might be a more intuitive way to approach this. Perhaps, I said to myself, I could put together a team—strictly from players who are out injured—better than the top-contending Celtics.
This was a couple of days ago, when Anthony Davis had hurt his eye. In the first ten seconds of perusing the injured list, my mind ran away with the idea of a starting five of Ja Morant, Scottie Barnes, Kawhi Leonard, Chet Holmgren, and Anthony Davis. Hell yeah! I mean, that’s a fun team.
But I had overlooked Kevin Durant, Zion Williamson, Jimmy Butler, Tyrese Maxey, Paolo Banchero … so many players. Could it be that there are two teams’ worth of injured players who could win the Finals? As I played it out, just looking at starting fives—TRUST me, there are plenty of role players to fill out these rosters—I ended up believing that if you forget the salary cap and wave a magic healing injury wand, there are at least three, and perhaps four title-winning teams on the injured list right now.
Tuesday morning at TrueHoop, we held a four-person fantasy draft. The rules: Pick five players who the ESPN.com injury report lists as likely to be out through at least November 15. That means our pool didn’t have players like Joel Embiid or Damian Lillard, but it did have a hundred or so others. (Also not considered: players still of playing age, but retired because of injury.)
The snake draft took about 25 minutes. We opened with my teasing Jarod that, of course, he would take Kevin Durant first, and then …
JAROD: Kevin Durant
HENRY: Kawhi Leonard (David: “What a shock!”)
DAVID: Scottie Barnes
TRAVIS: Chet Holmgren
TRAVIS: Desmond Bane
DAVID: Paolo Banchero
HENRY: Zion Williamson
JAROD: Ja Morant
JAROD: Tyrese Maxey (Jarod fretted about picking two small guards. David: “It’s a no-brainer. This is just an acquisition of talent. I don’t care about positions.”)
HENRY: Jimmy Butler
DAVID: Isaiah Hartenstein
TRAVIS: Trae Young
TRAVIS: Herb Jones
DAVID: Dejounte Murray
HENRY: Kristaps Porziņģis
JAROD: Mitchell Robinson
JAROD: De’Andre Hunter
HENRY: Andrew Nembhard
DAVID: Aaron Gordon
TRAVIS: Bradley Beal
And so we end up with:
Among our 20 players alone, there are:
Four NBA champions
Four Finals MVP awards
One NBA MVP trophy
25 All-NBA appearances
41 All-Star Game appearances
Three All-Star game MVPs
Four All-Defensive team honorees
Two defensive player of the year awards
Four rookie of the year winners
The point: there’s a TON of talent on the NBA’s shelf right now. The list of players available to round out our rosters is vast and deep: Khris Middleton, Lonzo Ball, C.J. McCollum, Kyle Kuzma, Jose Alvarado, Marcus Smart, Aaron Nesmith, Jaylin Williams, each and every Bogdanović …
The instant the draft ended, the trash talk began. Jarod noted his team was fast; David noted that those fast players “are gonna run super fast into my gigantic men.”
Travis said: “If we were doing actual fantasy basketball here, with fantasy stats, my team would kill you guys,” which … okay, fine—probably true. None of us know how to vet that statement. However, Travis probably has the two worst defenders in the draft, and let me just say my lineup of magically healthy Kawhi Leonard, Zion Williamson, Jimmy Butler, Kristaps Porziņģis, and Andrew Nembhard fills me with quiet confidence.
I wonder, though, how those players parents’ feel right now. Are they as confident? In some ways, their kids won the lottery, and everyone’s thrilled they’re not in some four-year school studying literature or management or whatever. In other ways, though, I imagine some of those players’ parents might like the idea that their adult children are likely to make it through all in one piece.
Thank you for reading TrueHoop!
Nice. Can’t wait to read your book “Ballistic” in May!