"What our orthopedics are telling us," Silver says, "is they're seeing wear-and-tear issues in young players that they didn't used to see until players were much older."
What Silver could not have known was just how steeply injuries -- and especially injuries to young players -- would impact the NBA the very next season. In 2017-18, the number of NBA games lost to injury or illness surpassed the 5,000 mark for the first time since the league stopped using the injured reserve list prior to the 2005-06 campaign, per certified athletic trainer Jeff Stotts, who has cataloged the careers of more than 1,100 players since that point and is considered the most authoritative public resource for tracking injuries in the NBA. This past season, in 2018-19, the league topped the 5,000 mark again.
In 2017-18, players who had been named to multiple All-Star teams missed an average of 14.63 games due to injury, the second-highest such figure that Stotts had recorded. That figure jumped this past season to 17.02.
And according to Stotts' database, the four highest tallies of games missed by young players in their first two seasons have occurred in the past four seasons. Players picked in the 2014 first round missed 838 games to injury during their first two seasons, the highest figure Stotts has ever recorded; in 2015, 637, the third-highest tally; in 2016, there were 548 missed games; and in 2017, 751 games, the second-highest.
The question is why.
Through dozens of interviews over the past two years with NBA team and league officials, current and former players, AAU coaches, parents, youth players, researchers, medical and athletic training officials in and around the NBA, as well as those intimately involved with youth basketball, one possible answer repeatedly emerged: Players, they say, are physically broken down by the time they reach the NBA.
"It is grave," says one NBA general manager, who says his team's injury databases on players entering the draft, dating back decades, leave "no question" that there are more orthopedic issues among young players in recent years. "It's very sad, where a kid has an NBA body, he's got NBA talent, he's got even an NBA mentality, but he doesn't have a body that can withstand the rigors of the training and the actual games, whether it's to get to the NBA or just to hold up. It's a tough deal."
'These kids are ticking time bombs': The threat of youth basketball
