On Monday night, Denver Nuggets star Jamal Murray suffered a torn ACL, the latest in a rash of injuries that has plagued an NBA season already impaired by COVID-19.
As soon as Murray went down, before any test results had revealed the severity of his injury, the NBA world reacted on social media, wondering if this truncated season, full of back-to-backs and fewer days of rest than ever before, will be worth it in the end.
The Utah Jazz meanwhile, have been one of very few teams in the league that has been able to push through this season relatively unscathed. To this point they’ve not had any major injuries or health issues with their core rotation, and their starting unit of Donovan Mitchell, Rudy Gobert, Mike Conley, Royce O’Neale and Bojan Bogdanovic have played the second most minutes of any lineup in the NBA this season.
The Jazz have experienced the normal bumps and bruises of a season, and there have been precautions the Jazz have taken. Joe Ingles’ ironman streak of 384 consecutive games played was snapped in January when he sat because of a sore right Achilles. Conley has been rested on one side of most back-to-backs this year to avoid aggravating a hamstring injury. Players at the very end of the bench have dealt with COVID-19 issues and there have been minor injuries, but nothing that has kept any key player out of the rotation for an extended period.
The Jazz have been lucky.
“I think it’s a little bit of everything,” Conley said of the team’s attention to detail this season. “Our performance staff has done a great job with us, even leading up to the season, and our coaches have done a great job of monitoring situations and practices and limiting shootarounds and what time we travel, how much sleep we get, to our chef and what we eat. Everything plays a part. And obviously, you need a little bit of luck. It’s a long season, a lot of things can happen and a lot of moving parts so we’ve been fortunate on that end.”
On Tuesday, for the first time this season a Jazz player, O’Neale, was held out of a game, not because of injury concern, but specifically for rest. Conventional wisdom says that if O’Neale is getting some time off, the same is likely to come for more of the Jazz roster.
In the past, players would point to fatigue or being tired and note that being tired is not an excuse, but recently the exhaustion level has been more noticeable and players have admitted to feeling the weight of a shortened season.
Jazz coach Quin Snyder said he looked back at film from the Jazz’s first game of the season and it was clear the players had lost a step, that they were less energized after 53 games of a 72-game season.
“You could tell it was the first game, we were shot out of a cannon,” Snyder said. “There’s just an extra gear, and you’re not going to necessarily have that every night and you won’t have it when one guy comes back from taking a game to rest, but all those things matter. We’ve been conscious of it the whole year. Obviously you’re balancing that with continuity and what you’re trying to accomplish in the regular season, but it’s important.”
The 2020-21 campaign began Dec. 22, two months later than the season would start in a normal season, and right off the bat, COVID-19 cases and contact tracing impacted teams. The league planned for the likelihood of that happening, releasing just the first half of the schedule so it could make up games that were postponed in the second half of the season.
In total, 31 games were postponed due to COVID-19 health and safety protocols. Usually the games were postponed because a team impacted by contact tracing was unable to field the required eight players.
The second half of the regular-season schedule, which wraps up May 16, just a month later than an NBA season would normally close, has been full of games with teams barely able to field eight players, not because of COVID-19 or contact tracing, but because injuries have plagued teams.
There’s no research or data to back up the theory that the condensed season has been the reason for so many injuries, but it could be that tired players are more susceptible to injury and this season, players are tired.
The Jazz’s second-half regular-season schedule included eight sets of back-to-backs and the Jazz are regularly playing four games in five nights, five games in seven nights and rarely have time for practice or shootarounds or real rest, not only because of the tight turnaround times between games, but also because COVID-19 and testing protocols take up a large portion of their downtime.
The Jazz largely credit their health, performance and training staff, headed by vice president of performance health care Mike Elliott, for keeping things running smoothly this season, but Murray’s injury for the Nuggets was the latest reminder that extra care and caution need to be taken, especially as the Jazz face the final month of the regular season and turn their eye to the playoffs.
“We’re very lucky with the situation we’ve got and the people that are employed here,” Ingles said. “Obviously a part of it does fall on the players. We’ve got to be accountable ourselves to come in early, stay later ... but I feel like as a whole organization from top to bottom, we’ve got the right players who know what they need to do and then obviously the staff that if you need some guidance or just need to be told what to do, they’re there to do that.”
Murray’s injury, like many others, has impacted not just the regular season but what can and will happen during the playoffs. The Nuggets, in the middle of the Western Conference’s playoff pack, will no doubt feel the effect of losing their second-leading scorer and primary ballhandler. The defending champion Los Angeles Lakers have been without LeBron James and Anthony Davis for more than a month and have fallen from second place in the West down to fifth.
The Eastern Conference favorite Brooklyn Nets were without Kevin Durant for 23 games due to a hamstring injury only to have him return and James Harden go out with a hamstring injury. The Charlotte Hornets and Atlanta Hawks have been fighting to keep their place in the East’s playoff running with a number of injuries and even the teams that are not in playoff contention are having to contend with issues of injury and fatigue.
As the injuries mount and the playoffs near, promising an increased level of physicality and competition, the idea of resting players, and players paying even more attention to their bodies has started to take greater priority.
“I think that’s super important, especially with the amount of games that we’ve been playing in a short period of time,” Georges Niang said. “I’m just thankful that we have (the performance staff) on our side to sometimes be precautious and hold us out when we’re going too much.”
While the Jazz have been lucky this season, and plan to take all the precautions necessary to delver a healthy team to the postseason, they don’t want to lose any of the advantages they’ve gained by having their main rotation available through the regular season.
The major benefit of having mostly the same team this season as the Jazz did last season was being able to go into 2021 with continuity and chemistry that some of the other teams might not have had.
Their luck and diligence on the health side has afforded the Jazz even more of a chance to build on that continuity and if they start to mess with the lineups and rotations so close to the playoffs, there’s a chance they could upset a balance or lose their place as the No. 1 seed in the West.
But, in the end, the Jazz would prefer to have a healthy, injury-free team, ready for a deep playoff run, rather than enter the postseason as the No. 1 seed but risk injury to one of their key players. And, the team that brings the healthiest roster to the playoffs, could be the one to walk away with a title.