The NBA Clearly Has An Achilles Injury Problem So Adam Silver Has Decided To Use A.I In An Attempt To Figure Out What The Hell Is Going On

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In professional sports, injuries are always going to be part of the equation. In some cases, they can shape an entire season or playoffs. A huge part of winning a championship is getting lucky, and an even bigger part of that luck is navigating a run while maintaining your health. I'm not sure there's a more obvious example of this than the 2024-25 NBA season. In addition to their execution, the newly crowned Champion Oklahoma City Thunder did not have to deal with any sort of injury to a main player. Injury luck was on their side, and they then took that luck and made enough plays to reach the top of the mountain. It's no surprise that the team that's usually the last one standing is the team that made it out alive and didn't lose a key piece to injury over the 4 playoff rounds. 

While injuries during an NBA season and their overall impact are nothing new, what is new is the number of devastating Achilles injuries we saw this year. Many will focus on the 3 big ones we saw during the playoffs (Dame, Tatum, Haliburton), but this is something that happened all throughout the season. Before the season started (DeRon Holmes, Nuggets), early in the season (James Wiseman and Isaiah Jackson, Pacers), the middle of the season (Dejounte Murray, Pelicans), and then the three in the playoffs. 

Given how devastating of an injury that can be for a basketball player, it's pretty important that Adam Silver and the league do everything they can to try and figure out what the hell is going on. To do that, Silver has decided to unleash A.I

I know A.I has a lot of dangerous uses and there's a chance that at one point it'll probably wipe us all out as a species, but in the meantime, I am all for using this technology for solving the very glaring Achilles injury issue that we're seeing in the NBA. If we're being honest I'm pretty fucking annoyed that Silver and the NBA has waited this long given that A.I has been around for some time now. Jayson Tatum had to lose a year of his NBA prime before you decided to upload some videos into a software program to learn what the hell is happening?

What I'd be interested in knowing is how many are related to previous calf injuries, and how many are generated by certain movements on the court. It does feel like we see a bunch happen when a player makes that step backward and plants on their heel. Players are so fast nowadays, and the game is so different, we're seeing players use moves that didn't exist decades ago. I remember wincing every time Haliburton made a herky-jerky move with the ball trying to attack a defender to start Game 7, knowing he had that strained calf. When you see the moment he got hurt, it was using a move that felt pretty familiar to previous Achilles ruptures.

People often point to the schedule and how much players play, and I'm sure that plays a role to some degree. I'm no doctor, but I can only imagine rest and recovery help prevent injury. But given the fact that we just saw 2x the Achilles injuries this year, and they happened at every part of the NBA season, that can't be the sole reason. This may just be the new reality based on how players are developing and the playstyle that exists in 2025. Perhaps this is also partly due to sports specialization and kids growing up only focusing on one sport. Who the hell knows (hopefully A.I will). 

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The point is, whatever the NBA can do to try and limit these potentially career-altering injuries is exactly what they need to be doing. If that's using an algorithm to learn more about what causes them and what preventable actions there might be, do it. If that means adjusting the schedule somehow, you do it. We are seeing players suffer these injuries in their mid-20s. It's essentially unprecedented. Players who are in incredible physical shape are still getting hurt. The NBA cannot live in a world where the Murray/Tatum/Haliburton's of the league are losing years of their primes if there's some way to prevent it or at least limit it.

What I do think we're about to see is that if any player has even the smallest issue with their calf, that's going to become an immediate shutdown injury. There's just no way you can even entertain the idea of risking it. It's too devastating an injury from both a player and team perspective. 

So hopefully, the nerds in charge of doing this research/deep dive can figure something out, because this is a problem the NBA needs to get under control one way or another.