The opening weeks of the NBA season have been besieged by absent stars. This past week’s games turned out to be particularly destructive. First, on Thursday, news broke that Philadelphia 76ers star guard Tyrese Maxey went down with a hamstring injury that will sideline him for multiple weeks. Then Zion Williamson. Then Ja Morant. Then Kevin Durant. Then Chet Holmgren. Each is expected to be sidelined with timetables measured in weeks, not days.
And that’s just this past week. Teams are fighting to keep their biggest names on the floor, and many are losing that battle. Joel Embiid and Kawhi Leonard haven’t even played a game yet. (Embiid is expected to make his season debut on Tuesday.) Jaylen Brown (missed four games), Stephen Curry (three), Zach LaVine (three) and Anthony Davis (one) have been banged up. Houston’s Fred VanVleet (hamstring) is set to miss his first game of the season on Tuesday. Paolo Banchero is out. So is Scottie Barnes, Dejounte Murray and Khris Middleton. All told, when you dive into the numbers, the NBA is bordering on a health crisis.
In Year 2 of the NBA's Player Participation Policy, star players are on pace to miss over 1,000 games this season, with games missed by star players up 24 percent in the early going compared to last season at this time. As the 2024 Emirates NBA Cup tips off on Tuesday, the excitement surrounding the second annual in-season tournament is being severely undercut by the growing list of injured stars.
The hope is that this is just an early-season blip, but there’s reason to believe that the dark cloud hovering over the league is here to stay.
Injuries are trending in the wrong direction across the NBA
Lakers star LeBron James has stated that his intention is to play all 82 games this season. A noble goal, to be sure. But he’s on a dwindling list of stars who can still pursue that distinction.
Using the NBA’s official definition of a star player, codified in the league’s Player Participation Policy as having made the All-Star team or All-NBA teams in the previous three seasons, there are 49 star players this season, ranging from LeBron to Lauri Markkanen. Through teams’ first 10 games this season, star players have missed a whopping 83 games already, up from last season’s total of 67 at the same juncture. Already, not even one month into the NBA season, 20 of the league’s 49 stars have bowed out of James’ 82-game quest, having missed at least one game due to injury or suspension this season.
Star injuries are an inevitability of the high-impact sport. However, the injury surge is happening earlier than normal. In recent seasons, stars played about 85-90 percent of their games in the first month of the season before the inherent violence of the game began to take its toll on bodies and winter illnesses attacked immune systems. This season, player participation by star players as a whole has dipped below 80 percent, hovering around 78 percent in recent days.
The thing is, that star designation only scratches the surface of the health problem. Other high-profile players who don’t fit the official designation of a star player are going down. OKC center Chet Holmgren, undoubtedly en route to his first All-Star appearance, fractured his hip and will be out for eight to 10 weeks. Boston center Kristaps Porziņģis hasn’t played all season. Denver’s high-flying forward Aaron Gordon is out multiple weeks. Holmgren, Porziņģis, Gordon and others aren’t considered “stars” by the league definition but certainly can be considered stars for their respective teams. And they’re sidelined for the foreseeable future.
Jeff Stotts of InStreetClothes.com has been publicly tracking injuries longer than anyone in the NBA space. By his count, the numbers are swelling league-wide, not just with the household names. His database shows that games lost due to injury across the entire NBA are already up to 686 games in the first three weeks of the season, a dramatic increase from 507 last season at the same mark. That’s a 35 percent surge from last season and up 16 percent from 2023-24’s level, according to Stotts’ data provided to Yahoo Sports.
Either way you look at it, star absences and overall games lost due to injury are way up, which is bad enough for players and teams navigating the 82-game season. But it’s also hurting the product, seemingly driving away disillusioned fans who wonder where the stars went.
As players suffer, so does the product
The injury problem looms large in the audience data. According to Sports Media Watch tracking, ESPN games in the opening weeks of the season have seen a 34% decline from the comparable point last year, with 600,000 fans tuning out on average. TNT games are down 14% over the first two weeks. Those declines could be explained by a multitude of factors, including the 2024 election and rising NFL ratings, but the injury variable presents a major obstacle for league partners.
Nothing demonstrates the NBA’s growing problem more acutely than last Wednesday’s national TV game between the Los Angeles Clippers and Philadelphia 76ers. It was supposed to be the juiciest star-studded matchup of the early season, pitting Kawhi Leonard and James Harden’s Clippers against their former teammate Paul George, who fled this offseason to form a superteam with Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey of the Philadelphia 76ers. George, who missed the first five games of the season with a bone bruise in his knee, was ready to play.
This was the showcase of the 2024-25 season, a celebration of all things new and exciting about this season.
Instead, Kawhi Leonard didn’t play. Neither did Embiid.
Adding to the anticipation was the fact that the game was being hosted in the brand new, state-of-the-art Intuit Dome, the spectacular new home of the Los Angeles Clippers. Leading up to the season, Clippers owner Steve Ballmer went on a media blitz, even going on 60 Minutes, to promote the new $2 billion building that has the tech world buzzing.
Many fans didn't bother showing up to the Sixers-Clippers game. The official attendance clocked in at just 15,627 fans, the lowest reported figure of the team's first seven home games. The visuals were worse as empty swaths of seats could be seen from fan videos inside the building.
The game fizzled on TV as well. Just 1.19 million people tuned in, according to Sports Media Watch tracking, down 36 percent from the same time slot last season. That amounts to about 650,000 fewer viewers than last season's Warriors-Nuggets tilt.
From a player health standpoint, it’s not a good sign if the game’s brightest stars are so injured that they can’t play in marquee games. That’s a real medical problem that the NBA has tried to fix with fewer back-to-backs, deeper medical staffs and a longer All-Star break.
But there’s another problem that has been equally hard to manage: the mushroom cloud of backlash stemming from those absences.
The Embiid altercation started as an injury story
A player injury was the fuse that lit the recent physical altercation between Embiid and a local reporter that caused Embiid to be suspended for three games. At its core, it all stemmed from the columnist's accusation that Embiid was voluntarily sitting out games, not too injured to play. From my perspective, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Marcus Hayes certainly overstepped by invoking Embiid's deceased brother and Embiid's son in his column. Evidently he felt that way too, since he deleted the remarks in his column.
But the deep mistrust of which Hayes drew upon was a result of the Sixers' obtuse self-reporting about Embiid's knee injury. The question lingered: Was Embiid injured or just resting? The team claimed it was just injury management not an actual injury, but the team also told ESPN's Tim Bontemps that the Sixers star was likely to strategically miss back-to-backs down the line. Fans and bettors alike were left in limbo trying to figure out what was going on with Embiid.
The league wasn’t happy about it, and understandably so. Before the season, the NBA decided to nationally broadcast five Sixers games that fell on a back-to-back set. The team was essentially sending the message that they’re preemptively punting those ABC, ESPN and TNT games. Sportsbooks trying to set lines on the games and futures were picking at breadcrumbs.
The NBA fined the Sixers $100,000 for "inconsistent" public statements by president of basketball operations Daryl Morey and coach Nick Nurse regarding Embiid's status. Three days after the fine, ESPN's Shams Charania reported that the Sixers found "minor swelling" in his knee during training camp, a detail that wasn't disclosed in previous injury reports. Had the Sixers just revealed that in training camp, would Hayes have the nerve to conjure up Embiid's family? Maybe, but we will never know.
It all comes back to player health. George, Maxey and Embiid haven’t played a single minute together and likely won’t until Thanksgiving at the earliest. Superteams seem to turn into mega letdowns. The way it’s going, the Sixers' situation feels eerily similar to the massively hyped Brooklyn Nets triumvirate of Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and James Harden that ended up playing just a handful of games together — and then disbanded.
The more this happens, the less fans will care about the product. The hope is that the early-season apathy from fans is nothing more than random noise that will take care of itself later. But the thing about injuries is that it tends to snowball as the season progresses. These things can accelerate quickly. Durant, Holmgren, Morant, Maxey and Williamson seemed fine a week ago, and now they'll be gone for weeks. If history serves as a guide, the worst has yet to come.
The well-intentioned Player Participation Policy established ahead of the 2023-24 season has not had the same effect on players' bodies as it did last regular season. In the opening stage of the season, star players took to the court more than they did in previous seasons. The In-Season Tournament was a success from that standpoint as every star played in the first slate of In-Season Tournament games except for Morant (suspension) and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who was dealing with a knee injury. But that honeymoon phase ended quickly. By All-Star break, absences began to skyrocket. By March, star participation plummeted to under 70 percent.
It continued in the postseason as Giannis Antetokounmpo, Jimmy Butler and half the New York Knicks' roster came up limp at the worst possible time. In the playoffs, 221 games were missed due to injury, according to Stotts' tracking, which marked about a 20 percent increase year-over-year, controlling for game count.
As we’re seeing now, the injury issue hasn’t gone away, though it’s too early to diagnose the root of the injury spike.
It’s entirely possible that early last season the league collectively rallied behind the new In-Season Tournament and the prospect of a monster TV media deal, and that carrot could have been a motivating factor to play. Those efforts were rewarded. In July, the NBA announced an 11-year, $76 billion pact that will soothe any sort of worries in the short-term.
But long-term, it remains a hot-button issue. The hope was that the PPP was the start of a new era where players were more motivated and able to play in front of a global audience. But as the Embiid altercation and injury trends have begun to swell, this is not about willingness to play. Last season’s early-season success story is beginning to look like the exception, not some new established baseline. As injuries ravage the biggest names, the league’s missing stars problem is nowhere near close to being solved.