It’s funny how much time we spend fixating on the NBA’s regular season and analyzing everything based on that sample size when, often, the playoffs hinge on the healthiest remaining teams more than anything else.
As we get set for both the Western Conference Finals and Eastern Conference Finals over the next two weeks, there’s a fair argument to make that the four squads left — the Oklahoma City Thunder, Minnesota Timberwolves, Indiana Pacers, and New York Knicks — are all, at least partly, only still standing because their main rotations remain intact and healthy. These four teams with nearly 100 games of mileage on their rosters right now are especially fortunate in this regard because they’re about to start two dangerous, respective schedules with games scheduled for every other night.
Yes, even when they have to travel between cities. Huh? Why?
After a postseason that’s seen major injuries to high-mileage difference-makers like the Boston Celtics‘ Jayson Tatum, the Golden State Warriors‘ Steph Curry, and the Denver Nuggets‘ Aaron Gordon — each of which helped contribute to their respective teams’ ultimate demise — it’s almost like the NBA is practically begging for someone new to get hurt with such a schedule. That or the league is clamoring for a de facto “Hunger Games” for the title purely because it wants a playoff game every other night for marketing purposes rather than prioritizing the health of its best players and a better, cleaner product in its biggest games of the entire year.
Make it make sense. Because, as it stands, it doesn’t.
This is a pressing discussion that Gordon himself pleaded with the league to change after he played a Game 7 against the Thunder with a Grade 2 hamstring strain on limited rest and after he watched injuries happen to other players like Tatum and Curry.
Honestly, Gordon makes a really compelling case:
To be sure, Gordon’s position does somewhat come from a place of frustration about what the Nuggets themselves had to endure during their 2025 playoff run. Over the course of roughly five weeks, Denver received just three periods of rest that were more than one day. At one point, by the time they won a pivotal Game 6 against the Thunder to send it to Game 7, the Nuggets had played nine games in 17 days.
(Note: The Nuggets and Thunder even unfathomably played a scheduled game with less than 36 hours of rest. It’s a wonder no one got injured there.)
To no one’s surprise, the Nuggets were running on fumes by the end, and they unfortunately watched Gordon, one of their lynchpins, suffer a soft-tissue injury at the worst possible time.
Maybe teams like the Nuggets feel this less if they didn’t have to play seven games in back-to-back series. Maybe they also feel it less if they had more depth on a top-heavy roster. These are problems the deeper Thunder, Timberwolves, Pacers, and Knicks all managed to solve. Even with that said, it still seems very unsafe and irresponsible to build in no extended rest in the general schedule of any NBA playoff series, whether it goes seven games or not.
Because this whole fiasco is bigger than the Nuggets, Celtics, or Warriors. At a certain point, even while you have some of the finest athletes in the world playing in your league, they’re still human. And you’re asking too much of humans who have bodies like the rest of us normal folks with the same physical limitations.
To those who might say today’s NBA players are actually soft for not being able to handle this toll, let me put this bluntly: you don’t know what you’re talking about.
The athletes in today’s league are better than ever. They jump higher. They run faster. They’re flat-out stronger. It’s just true. All of that does not come without a price when you’ve already been playing professional basketball for half of the calendar year by the time the playoffs roll around. Plus, with the proliferation of the 3-point shot leaguewide, everyone is expected to cover more ground per game than at any point in the NBA’s history. There’s just so much more cutting, stopping and starting, and positional shifting back and forth all over the court than there ever has been.
It is not the same game that I imagine many of you used to watch back in the day. Heck, it’s not even really close to the same game that it was 10 years ago. There’s a good reason that many players don’t push themselves all the time in a regular season that sometimes feels endless.
They genuinely don’t have the energy to do so.
Gordon’s point is salient and cogent for every NBA player. It’s a real problem that needs to be addressed by doing the right thing. I hope it doesn’t fall on deaf ears to a league and commissioner in Adam Silver that seems like it’s constantly trying to fix unimportant “issues” which have nothing to do with protecting and prioritizing the game or its players. The NBA making mountains of mole hills, by the way, has likely contributed to this tangible playoff scheduling problem, as the relatively new (and pointless) in-season and play-in tournaments have effectively have added two weeks to the season.
You know, two weeks of time that could’ve been spread out over every playoff team’s postseason schedule instead. Hmm. Those days could have been useful, I think!
If the NBA actually cares about its players, it needs to listen to Aaron Gordon. Full stop. Not addressing this in a sufficient fashion would be completely unacceptable for a league that really needs to look at itself in the mirror.
