“I have no doubt that the additional stress, again physical and emotional, on them contributes to injuries,” Silver said. “None of it is an exact science. It’s something that even pre-COVID, as you all know, we were very focused on at the league. We put people in place to focus exclusively on injury prevention. Precisely why we have the injuries we do is still unclear to us. It’s something that we’ll continue to study in the offseason. The trend line, unfortunately, has been going up for the last several years.”
The 82-game season isn’t set in stone going forward, either.
“We have had this 82-game season for 50-plus years,” Silver said. “I mean, is 82 optimal? You know, it’s interesting. We got this experiment during the pandemic to move to 72. Everybody thought that was the cure-all, if we just lopped 10 games off the season. I mean, obviously injuries are up, so that wasn’t it.”
Game 7 of the NBA Finals, if necessary, is July 22. Training camps for next season are set to begin on Sept. 28, meaning it is possible that Milwaukee and Phoenix are back in camp as little as 68 days following the end of the finals.
Last season’s finalists, the champion Los Angeles Lakers and Miami Heat, had 51 days between the end of the 2020 finals and the start of this season’s training camp — with this season’s game schedule beginning 72 days after the Lakers won the title at the restart bubble at Walt Disney World.
