The NBA is in the Red Zone
How the NBA is pushing its players to the brink
Outside of a global pandemic, the 2025-26 season is on pace to be arguably the most injurious NBA season of the past decade, which should scare everyone. Injuries are an ever-present occupational hazard of sports, and unfortunately, their presence is only growing.
Over the past century and a half, largely due to the advancements in training, nutrition, and the unquenchable thirst of capitalism, the intensity, speed, and frequency of nearly every major sport have exploded. In another half-century, historians will look at the early 21st century as the era when performance began to cannibalize the performer.
The human body can only recover so fast, and with each passing year, we demand more and more from our athletes. In sport physiology, the point where exhaustion and overtraining forewarn increased injury risk is colloquially known as the red zone. And with each passing year, the world of sport dives ever deeper into the red zone, and the NBA is along for the plunge.
The 2025-26 NBA season cannot be removed from the 2024-25 season, nor the upcoming 2026-27 campaign. We might categorize seasons based upon arbitrary dates, but basketball is a never-ending, uninterrupted story. When we view the sport through the prism of injury, we must acknowledge that single seasons aren’t isolated data points, but rather a necessary distinction to organize our concept of time.
That being said, the injury trend lines in the NBA are highly concerning. As we’ll see shortly, 2025-26 might go down as the most injurious season in recent memory, but that is partly due to 2024-25, and 2025-26 will almost certainly spill over into 2026-27. Before going down the rabbit hole completely, here’s a brief explanation of the data I’m using, why I’m using it, and what it tells us.
Notes on Data
Unfortunately, the data we’re working with is severely limited, but what I do have tells a compelling story. Spotrac tabulates, per team, how many players have been injured, how many games and days they’ve missed, and how much cash all that adds up to. The data reliably goes back to the 2016-17 season, but even in the interim, there were a few data collection errors that I had to manually fix through deductive reasoning– namely, days missed errors. What this means is that these figures aren’t exact to a tee, but at a macro level, they’ll be good enough.
The player, games, and days missed data capture the frequency and severity of injuries throughout the league, while cash spent will be used as a proxy for player quality. Instead of relying on wins above replacement lost due to injury, simply seeing how much money has gone out the door to injured players does an excellent job. At the end of the day, players are compensated based on skill level.
The 2025-26 figures are adjusted to capture what these figures will likely be at the end of the season. The data is as of March 24 and is adjusted from the 72-game mark out to 82. I’ll provide the current figures in each blurb.
Player Injuries by Season
Unfortunately, the COVID-era throws a real wrench in this analysis. The 2019-20 season, which saw the season put on hold, has an abnormal decline in injuries, while the 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons see a massive spike. My educated guess is that the break in 2019-20 allowed many players to get healthy and get fresh, which shaved off a fair amount of player injuries. As for 2020-21 and 2021-22, a ton of players missed time due to COVID, while the 2020-21 season started in December after a short offseason and was relatively compressed.
Despite the COVID conundrum, the trend line is strikingly clear. Since 2016-17, injuries have risen at an alarming rate. While some might suggest that this is due to teams fabricating injuries for tanking purposes, you don’t get from 410 player injuries to 510 simply through fraud. Now, more than ever in the last decade, players are more likely to suffer an injury. The unadjusted rate is 451, which might be enough breathing room to fall under the 500 from the season prior.
Games Missed to Injury by Season
Unsurprisingly, the correlation between total injuries and games missed is incredibly strong. However, it is somewhat comforting that 2025-26 is on pace to see a decline in total games missed to injury. Now, in a league with 30 teams, with ten games on average left to play, it wouldn’t take much to blow past 2024-25’s 7,625 games missed figure.
The potential for a downtick in games missed to injury is no cause for celebration. Unadjusted, players have already missed 6,428 games to injury this season, which would rank fourth in the sample. Some of that is a carryover from the spate of long-term injuries suffered in the playoffs, but more and more, players are losing game action to injury.
Total Days Lost to Injury by Season
Games missed and total days missed have the strongest correlation among the five factors we’ll be analyzing. Somehow, 2024-25 eclipsed 15,000 without the aid of a pandemic, and while 2025-26’s projected 13,674 is a return to normalcy, it would still be the second-highest non-COVID season.
The fact that players are suffering more injuries but are missing fewer games and days could indicate one of two things. The first is that players are suffering less severe injuries. The second is that they are returning more quickly. However, the average days missed due to injury has bounced between 12.21 days in 2016-17 and 15.76 days in 2017-18. This is definitely a trend to monitor, but what it really means will require a far more robust analysis.
Cash Spent on Injured Players by Season
This is the least informative chart of the bunch, and the reason why is simple. The salary cap has exploded from $94,143,000 in 2016-17 to $154,647,000 in 2025-26. Injuries could have gone down, and this figure would be all but certain to grow. However, the cash totals are still informative. The NBA is spending over a billion dollars a year to pay injured employees. Let that sink in.
Even if injury is an occupational hazard, it’s bad business to divert so many resources to unproductive employees, which doesn’t even take into account the cost of insurance, health care, and the entire health apparatus. For a league that would get into bed with the devil for money like late-90s South Park, solving the injury issue should maybe be a priority.
Percent of Salary Cap Spent on Injured Players by Season
While total cash spent is a somewhat superfluous metric, the percentage of salary cap space designated to injured players is not. It captures not only the amount and severity of injuries, but also the who. Since salary and production are strongly linked, it shows us how much quality the game is missing due to injury.
Since 2016-17, excluding the pandemic seasons, the 2025-26 NBA season is on pace to spend the highest percentage of its salary cap on injured players. Adjusted to account for the season’s final games, 28.08% of all salary will have gone to players on the injured list, according to Spotrac’s team injured list tracker. Even unadjusted, which assumes all players currently injured suddenly became healthy, the figure comes in at 24.66%, the second-highest non-COVID figure behind 2024-25.
This, to me, is the single biggest issue facing the NBA. Injuries are hurting the quality of the product, which also dampens the legitimacy of accomplishments. How many title runs felt like they were decided by injury? How often are MVP, All-NBA, and Defensive Player of the Year ballots filled with the few seasonal survivors?
An oft-discussed topic this season has been the seeming uptick in star-player injuries. To see if that’s really true, I decided we should follow the money. To do this, I found the cash per day missed due to injury, divided it by the seasonal salary cap, and then multiplied it by 100,000, so we have a number that we can actually wrap our heads around.
The larger the figure, the more expensive, relative to the salary cap, the average injured player is. As you can see, 2025-26 is a banner year, and outside of the first COVID-interrupted season, it’s in a league of its own. Obviously, there was a rash of high-profile injuries in 2024-25 that have impacted this season’s bottom line, but we’re looking for league trends, not what’s the worst season in the data set.
As the demands on star players only continue to increase, the game has never been more physically demanding. The total distance players have to cover has been steadily growing since the 1980s, and in recent years, teams have embraced high-intensity tactics to harvest ever-elusive efficiency. As fans, we want to see the game’s best push the limits, but that requires them to be healthy enough to do so.
Solutions
I’m not sure when the NBA entered the red zone, but they’re there now. In the short-term, 2025-26 may be the high point for player injuries, but the overall trend suggests this is a long-standing, growing problem. Fortunately, there are solutions, and one of them, the league has already started to engage with.
Expansion, while almost certainly motivated by a quick, massive injection of cash, should help ease the burden on players in the short-term. With the addition of two new franchises, the overall talent in the league will be diluted ever so slightly. In theory, this should ease the burden on the league’s best players.
The issue has never been whether the human body can hold up over 82 games; the issue is whether the human body can hold up at this intensity for 82 games. A sudden dilution in talent artificially widens the gap between the best players and the new league average, thus dropping their nightly demands. How much this will help is unknowable, but it should, in theory, ease the load on the league’s most important players.
Now, the other alternatives are far less likely to garner widespread support from the actual decision makers in the league. The most obvious solution is to cut the season down from 82 games. If the season is about 175 days and there are 82 games, that means there is a game roughly every 2.13 days. Simply cutting the season down to 72 games would see teams play once every 2.43 days. While that doesn’t seem like much, it’d cut the number of games per 30 days by 1.71. That would make games off for rest less necessary, but also far more beneficial, not to mention the added practice days.
Personally, I’d cut the season down to 62 games, with every team playing a perfectly balanced schedule, once expansion hits. From there, I’d expand the NBA Cup to make up for some of the lost games. Have a group phase with eight groups of four, where teams play each other twice, and the top two teams from each group make a round of 16 single-elimination bracket. This guarantees six additional games, for a minimum of 68, but maxes out at 72 games for the two teams that make the final.
Another idea that has been bandied about is cutting the length of games down from 48 minutes. I’m not a huge fan of this, but it is definitely a solution. An interesting idea would be to cut the game down to 44 minutes, but keep those four minutes in the game’s true elapsed time. Basically, take those four minutes of game action and turn them into four minutes of rest.
Some people have suggested the NBA should explore rule changes to curtail the physical demands on players, but that seems like an impossibility. You cannot wipe away the advantages that playing with extreme intensity and athleticism provides without fundamentally changing the fabric of the sport.
The NBA is facing a problem that they’ve continuously and vehemently denied exists. As recently as January of 2024, the NBA sent a study which claimed that there was no link between load management and injury prevention over the prior ten seasons. Now, just two years later, the league is facing a growing star injury crisis, and they don’t like the results. There are solutions to this problem, but it may require a small sacrifice in revenue today to preserve the health of the stream for years to come.
For any inquiries about work, discussion, and the like, you can email me at nevin.l.brown@gmail.com.