Injuries are plaguing the NBA more than usual, and no one knows why

The best ability is availability in today’s NBA. It’s so hard to keep key players on the court these days.

There’s no particular reason why players have struggled to stay on the court year after year over the past decade. Each injury is a situation with its own set of circumstances.

Teams have tried just about anything to keep players playing. We have seen The NBA’s workload management era has come and gone. Teams allowed their players rest days to ensure their long-term health as they enrolled further into the NBA season and playoffs.

But that didn’t work. Injuries were still a problem. So now the league there are new rules for player participation which require players to play when relatively healthy. If they don’t, teams face penalties. Also, the league is new Rule 65 Prize Games it’s supposed to incentivize players to be sure they’re on the court.

As it turns out, that didn’t work either.

Injuries in the NBA are increasing every year, according to data from the Jeff Stotts InStreetClothes Injury Tracking Database.

Not only are injuries on the rise, but so are they way so far this season. This graphic from Sportico visualizes it for us.

In Week 7 of NBA action, a total of 310 games have been missed this season. Last year, at the same time, that number was only 127. As you can see from the graph, the numbers have been increasing throughout the season, week by week.

there is more. HoopsHype’s injury salary tracker shows us the last time some of the the highest paid players in the league last played basketball. There are a lot of really expensive players who have missed a lot of time so far this season.

SEE MORE: HoopsHype also tracked injuries for individual teams

Again, there is no rhyme or reason to this. At least not any obvious ones. There are certainly theories as to why players are so injured. Maybe it’s just that the players are forced to play more because of the new league rules. Or maybe it’s just a trend inherent in this era of the NBA where AAU basketball is so prevalent. Players play so much from early high school to the professional ranks.

It could also just be dumb luck! That’s more than I’m leaning towards at this point. We can fast forward to a month from now when some of these players will be healthy again and things may look completely different. We’ll have to wait and see.

I will say this though: “Shorten the NBA season” advocates out there can make one heck of a case today.