Hello, hi, BASKETBALLWEATHER is back on this beautiful 2nd day of February in Los Angeles. A special hello to all of our new subscribers, there’s a few of you, and I appreciate you joining the rest of us. We do basketball a bit differently here, all new faces, and faces in general are always welcome. Let’s talk durability
This is one of those things that pulls at the follicles of many an NBA fan’s receding hairline. It’s something Lebron himself has said is his most enduring and magical quality: His ability to stay healthy, and play consistently.
As Lebron has aged like a fine Cabernet, his ability to play the entire season has of course needed to adapt, but prime Lebron, there’s no way he was missing games unless a stable of Russian tanks was placed on the highway on his way to the Rocket Mortgage Arena in Cleveland.
Joel Embiid has been a vastly different story. Ever since he arrived in the NBA he’s been hitting his head on the durability ceiling, never having once made it through a season in his career yet, and always somehow being injured or a shell of himself by the time he gets to the playoffs.
The most games Embiid has ever played out of 82 has been 68; the second most 66.
Recently, a buddy of mine who played high-high-high level basketball explained some of the mechanics at work here. Essentially, as he put it, part of a player’s responsibility was to know how to use his body so that he did not put his body at risk for injury. He was clear that a player could control this aspect of the game, almost like a ballet dancer on stage, knowing precisely how to leverage his strength for maximum and minimal risk to injury. He was careful to say that this was not a science, that of course unexpected events could happen that could lead to injury, ie: someone massive landing on your rib cage, but that some players who consistently injured themselves, you know, could potentially lack an understanding of how to use their bodies as precisely as they need to to properly mitigate the risk.
Said differently, a player could mitigate her risk for injury if she had a sophisticated understanding of how her body and physiology could be used as a tool, just as her shot, passing ability, and free throws could be used to affect the game, so could her body.
According to my basketball guru, most of this came down to a player’s footwork.
Footwork, I said? Footwork sounds like it might be the grammar of basketball. My friend just about spit his Diet Coke on my sweater vest, that’s how stoked he was by what I had just said.
I’ll let the basketball pros, medical people, and strategic savants battle out the viability of that philosophy, but I feel semi-fairly confident that someone like Lebron James or Jokic would agree, at least in part, to the sentiment that at least in part injury can be mitigated by a player’s own footwork, and that durability is an essential component of the NBA game that can be controlled more than we like to let on in the world of sports media and fandom.
Back to Embiid, and not to pick on you, Joel, because there are plenty of other players in the NBA who are guilty of frequent injuries, <pick your poison>, but there is something — has to be something — to the fact that he gets injured every season, and usually at the most conspicuous times.
Part of this, no doubt, is due to his massive frame. At 7 feet and 280 pounds, he weighs double that of a large portion of the adult population on the planet, and though he might be a shorty in comparison to someone like Wemby or Andre the Giant, the dude is still massive, a mountain who can dribble the ball through his legs like it’s a fireball, and splash it over you with the smooth grace of a dolphin, or swallow you whole like some old school Shaq shit.
Or as his teammate Kelly Oubre elegantly said,
“You’ve got people pressuring him to force being great when he’s 300 pounds, seven-feet-five?” said Oubre, who exaggerated Embiid’s listed size of 7-feet and 280. “Like, c’mon bro. Yeah, he has to do what he has to do. I think this year, people will really understand that his whole career he’s been having to make sure his body’s right. This is like NASCAR, right? If their cars ain’t working, and their mechanics ain’t really able to get the job done before the race, then what can they do? They can’t race. This is our bodies. Our body is our car and we have to treat it with respect. He’s 350 pounds, bro. So you know, I’m praying for him for a speedy recovery, so he can come in and give himself the best chance. But at the end of the day, that’s not important. His body and his career are most important.”
I mean, respect on every last word that his teammate just said there, but it leads us into this thorny issue of the 65 game minimum players need in order to become eligible for the big NBA awards like MVP and All NBA.
The reason this is so important is of course that player’s salaries are attached to those accomplishments. It’s the reason why ESPN’s Zach Lowe decides he isn’t going to vote for MVP anymore, he doesn’t want to be responsible for obliterating a player’s ability to “feed their family.” 1
65 games out of 82 (a full season) might not seem like that much of a hurdle to clear, but we forget that we’ve all been living in an NBA where players, especially star players, can play basically as many games as they want during the regular season, and not be penalized.
Some players of course are more egregious manipulators of this system than others, and for the record, I don’t blame them. Shit, if I got paid to work less I would too. And yeah, 82 games is too many. But what if it’s not?
Okay, haha, don’t get me wrong, I want to see Lebron play until he is 50, and ditto for Steph Curry, but it does start to get a bit too soap opera-y with these legacy types being able to stick around so far passed their primes, a bit like the WWE, where NBA players have become such beloved household names that the NBA has to invent new ways for its stars to thrive because it literally can’t afford to lose them. A bit fake.
Hence the Play In Tournament, a way for 9th and 10th place teams to have a shot at the playoffs. I mean, 9th and 10th, there’s only 15 teams in a conference! Should we allow the WASHINGTON WIZARDS a bonus spot in the Play-In pee-pee tournament because they have a cute player or two on their team?
Yay for oldies like Lebron and Steph, and teams like the Heat who always have a shot because they can treat the NBA regular season like the afterthought / durability shit show that it is, yipeeee.
At what point does the championship get watered down though?
So now we come to a crossroads. Joel Embiid is halfway through a historic season not seen since Wilt Chamberlain, he is undeniably unbelievable, turning even naysayers in Los Angeles into full throated believers of his game, and then he gets injured, again.
Because of the 65 game rule, instilled by the NBA to inspire players to durability, this historic season by Embiid may not allow him to be eligible for the MVP, an award he is clearly the front runner for, even though he has only crossed that 65 game benchmark twice! In his life!
I hate that so much for Embiid, the NBA, and most of all us, the fans, but it’s a stew the NBA has cooked for itself, comprised of a decade-plus of coddling their star players, and deemphasizing the importance of the 82 game season, and by virtue of that the very concept of durability itself.
So, here’s what I propose: What if the NBA season was 101 games? Couldn’t we just reverse psychology this shit and everyone wins? Just saying. Otherwise we may as well call the 65 game rule the Joel Embiid Rule, in honor of the best injury-prone player who should’ve won the MVP.
Adios,
Thanks for spending some time in my zombie brain. If you like what you just read, how about a coffee so I can write more of these for you.
Hilariously, I’ve heard that quote “feed your family” used before, not by Zach Lowe, as if NBA players who are eligible for these awards are somehow in danger of losing the ability to take care of anything. We’re talking about a few extra millions for men who already make multiples of 10 million, each. But I digress.