Injuries hit hard in the NBA last season, and Adam Silver has made it a mission to keep players on the court.
With the aim of improving player health, the NBA has appointed an Injury Prevention Committee dedicated to injury research and analytics.
From ESPN:
After a season marred by high-profile injuries to star players, the NBA has formed a committee to promote research into player health.
The initiative is in partnership with GE Healthcare. It will be spearheaded by a 20-person strategic advisory board that will be comprised of team physicians and clinical researchers from various fields, including orthopedics, sports medicine, radiology and epidemiology.
Though the board will not perform the actual research as a unit, the goal is to identify and design research projects that will help keep athletes on the floor through improved detection protocols and treatment programs.
Among the many topics the advisory board could target for research, according to DiFiori, are schedule density, schedule length, and air travel and its resulting effect on injury rate. In the preseason, the NBA experimented with a 44-minute game instead of the standard 48 minutes, sparking a larger conversation about the grind of the 82-game schedule.
