The N.B.A.’s Breakneck Momentum

The 2src25-26 season began, more or less, a few minutes into the last game of the 2src24-25 season, during Game Seven of the N.B.A. Finals, when Tyrese Haliburton, the Indiana Pacers star, stood above the arc with the ball, planted his right foot as he began to drive, and then sprawled to the ground. As the Oklahoma City Thunder scooped up the ball and raced past Haliburton, who lay face down, he pounded the ground. Haliburton, already dealing with a calf strain, had torn his Achilles tendon. Without him, the Pacers didn’t stand a chance. The game—and the season—was effectively over.

At the time he was injured, in June, Haliburton was playing in his ninety-sixth game since the season began. After the injury, it’s unlikely that he’ll play in any games this season at all. The impact of his injury has been devastating to the Pacers’ prospects, and he’s hardly the only key player on the team to miss significant time so far, with disastrous results. The Pacers went from winning the Eastern Conference this past summer to starting this season with a dismal 4–16 record.

Other teams can tell similar, if less dramatic, stories. Jayson Tatum, of the defending-champion Boston Celtics, tore his Achilles in the final minutes of an intense playoff game against the New York Knicks last season, ruining his team’s hopes of a repeat. There’s a small chance that he’ll return this spring, but in the off-season the Celtics blew up its core of expensive veteran players anyway, acknowledging that their hopes of winning this season were wrecked. The Houston Rockets made a splashy trade for Kevin Durant in July, hoping to contend for a championship this go-around, before their starting point guard, Fred VanVleet, went down with a torn A.C.L. in September. LeBron James did not play in the Los Angeles Lakers’ opening game while suffering from sciatica, his first time missing the start of the season in twenty-three years, and was off the court until mid-November. The Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo rampaged through the first few weeks before injuring his groin. The San Antonio Spurs’ miraculously long and skilled young Frenchman, Victor Wembanyama, who electrified the league at the start of the season, is now missing time with a calf strain. Several other star players, including Anthony Davis and Ja Morant, have also been out with strained calves. On Wednesday, the Golden State Warriors’ Stephen Curry hobbled to the locker room after a series of collisions and is expected to miss at least a week with a bruised quad. And so on.

Injuries happen, especially when one player crashes into another at high speeds, as Curry did. But injuries right now are happening at an alarming rate—particularly those that involve trauma to muscles, ligaments, and tendons. Last season was one of the most injury-marred seasons in N.B.A. history. According to the athletic trainer Jeff Stotts, who tracks injury data, players missed around sixty-five hundred games with injuries—the highest in nearly twenty years, not counting the COVID seasons. The first month and a half of this season has been just as bad. The difference is that such a high proportion of stars—defined in this case as a player who has made an All-Star or All-N.B.A. team at least once in the past three seasons—have been affected by soft-tissue injuries. Stars have already missed more than two hundred games between them. It is the story of the season so far: on any given night, nearly half the league’s best and most well-known players are sitting on the bench, in street clothes.

And yet the games so far this season have been thrilling: dramatic, high-quality, fun, fast. Really fast. According to ESPN Research, the average pace of play is the fastest it has been in nearly forty years. And players are running farther and faster, on average, than at any point since player tracking began, in 2src13-14. It’s easy to see, and to understand why. For years, teams across the league developed better and better offenses. Shot selections became increasingly efficient. More and more players developed deep three-point shots, and were willing to take them. Coaches had a better understanding of how to manipulate space and achieve favorable defensive mismatches, often by having players cut quickly across the floor. Teams became adept at running out in transition, flying to beat the opponent down the floor. Now teams are responding by putting a bigger emphasis on defense, playing with a throttling full-court intensity. Last year, the Pacers were at the forefront of this shift. They contested everything—tipping balls, sneaking in for steals, trying to drive players out of bounds. Certain role players, deep on the bench, earned minutes during the playoffs by largely wearing out the opposing teams’ best players. The Pacers rode that strategy all the way to the Finals, where they met another team, the Thunder, whose defense was even better—and they played fast, too.

Others noticed. Teams are now pressing more and more, hoping to cause turnovers and discombobulate offenses. They are picking up ball handlers early, sometimes trapping and harassing them in the backcourt. They’re disrupting passing lanes and leaning in for steals. They’re flying out past the arc to fend off three-point shots, and then diving into the paint to disrupt drives. They’re cutting back and forth, crashing through and over people, trying to outplay offenses that are trying to outsmart them by hunting better matchups. Part of the allure of these more vigorous tactics is that (cheaper) role players can meaningfully contribute to the organized chaos. In fact, they have to: the approach often requires quicker substitutions and deeper rotations. Playing with that kind of intensity is exhausting.