Bodies and Spaces

"NBA players have never been more talented, and never been more fragile-- they are passing rocks in glass houses."

It won’t surprise anyone to know that the reason I’ve become so enamored with professional sports in recent years is due to the strong narrative intrigue surrounding them. And no league is more beholden to these narratives than the NBA. These dramatic swings can happen over the course of entire decades, or within a single season.

More than anything else, the 2024-25 NBA season was a referendum on player health, conditioning, and general well-being.

This may seem odd, considering how common injuries are. And, yes, that’s part of what I’m getting at, the reality of the modern NBA is that everybody is hurt all the time. The phrase “when healthy” is common parlance in discussion circles, made irrelevant by the fact that nobody is ever healthy.

The most egregious, confusing, and worrisome way this narrative impacted the season was through Joel Embiid.

The whole story is far more complicated than this, but for those not in the loop: Joel hurt his knee last year. He got surgery, came back for the playoffs, and didn’t look right. He then played in the summer Olympics, and still didn’t look right, but for the most part, medically speaking, every indication was that he would be fine.

That changed when, a little under a month before the season started, the Sixers announced a plan for Joel. He wasn’t ready to play, and would take off the first stretch of games to “ramp up” and get “back in shape.” Additionally, they would routinely sit him out of games to make sure he was physically fresh for the playoffs.

Now, six months later, the Sixers just finished the worst season any Philadelphia sports team has ever had.¹ Not only has this “plan” been an abject disaster, but it was also seemingly built on lies? I honestly can’t tell you! It has been very difficult to parse fact from fiction, because the communication around this issue from the Sixers’ front office has been a comedy of errors.

We were told Joel was taking a month off to get in shape. He took that month off, and when he came back, he was clearly not in shape. Not even close. Later in the season, Joel told a sideline reporter that he “probably needs another surgery in the offseason,” which completely blindsided the organization, they had no idea what he was talking about. This disrupted the obvious mandate to not be forthright about Joel’s knee issues.

I’m not a doctor, and I strongly recommend you research this whole thing on your own. But here’s a layman’s explanation of what we know:

Joel no longer has meniscus tissue in his knee, meaning that bones are grinding together down there. This causes significant swelling, and from what I can gather, playing professional basketball while suffering from this swelling is a non-starter. He simply can’t do it. Meaning that Joel could barely play three games in a row before his knee flared up, and he had to sit out again.

The Sixers’ medical staff wanted him to play through his knee condition, in hopes that the swelling would go down, and he’d be able to build resilience over time. This did not work. At all. In fact, it was such a shitshow that I seriously considered the possibility that the team doctors were just incompetent and had no fucking idea what to do. And, look, Joel is far from blameless in this whole thing, but he wanted to explore other options and not have to play through this, and that’s very understandable.

Which side you want to defer to here is up to you. One party is a team of medical professionals, the other party is the athlete who actually has to play with and live in this body. Regardless, Joel recently got surgery, and we have no idea if he’ll ever return to his old MVP self again.

Contrast all of this with his new teammate Paul George, and the way his injuries were handled this season. He played, got hurt in the game– we all saw it– they said he had “this injury, and he’ll be out for this long.” And, lo and behold, that’s what happened. Now, this is not a defense of Paul George’s season. It was 2023 Trea Turner all over again, but with none of the charm and no happy ending. He’s a loser and I want him out of my city expeditiously.²

Now, if you don’t follow the NBA, I wouldn’t blame you for assuming the Sixers had the most miserable season out of all 30 teams. No, that goes to the Dallas Mavericks. In the midnight hour of February 1st, 2025, the Mavericks completed the worst trade in the history of professional sports, shipping out Luka Doncic— a top three player in the league who is on track to be one of the greatest of all time— in return for Anthony Davis, a man seven years his senior, and with a resume one tenth as impressive.

The explicit, stated reason the front office gave for trading Luka was a deep concern about his demeanor, conditioning, and lifestyle habits. He has serious anger problems, and is constantly bitching at refs, coaches, and players, to the point of being actively detrimental to his team. Through his anger, he has taken himself out of the equation during games where championships are at stake, in the FIBA playoffs and NBA Finals. He does not stay in good enough shape, and it’s directly caused him to get hurt. And it’s an open secret that he “likes pizza and beer.”

Two things can be true at the same time:

1. These concerns about Luka are real, and significant.

2. They do not come remotely close to justifying trading him in general, let alone the trade that they actually made.

And for the purposes of the narrative, I want to focus on the first point. Plenty has been said about the second, but I’m professionally obligated to tell you that Anthony Davis is also very injury prone, more so than Luka, which made the whole thing ironic, on top of being awful and stupid.

The reason I put the “pizza and beer” thing in quotes is because I think the NBA media has collectively agreed to couch Luka’s problems in the most polite way possible. Tim McMahon, a reporter who recently wrote a book about Luka, routinely goes on podcasts and says “he enjoys a post game beer, or two, or three… or six.”

And this is always dismissed as an offhand joke, a cute personality trait. But when I hear this, it tells me that Luka is a binge drinking alcoholic. I don’t think this is a conspiracy or absurd speculation. There was a viral clip last year of a Mavericks executive physically taking a beer out of Luka’s hand, during a post game celebration during the playoffs. I’m supposed to see that, and then assume the executive is overreacting and being lame or something?

The example that always gets brought up is Larry Bird, who also enjoyed beer. And, obviously, going out and drinking after games is par for the course for NBA players. But what gets lost in these comparisons is that they did not have obvious negative consequences on the court, to the point where they necessitated trades. The Mavericks looked at all of this in concert and said, “we know for a fact we will not win a championship with him, so we should pivot now.”

Zion Williamson, a star on the New Orleans Pelicans, is also infamously overweight and poorly conditioned, and when his issues were the talk of the town a couple years ago, I was sincerely curious as to what he was eating on any given day. How many calories do you have to consume to be 60 pounds overweight as a 6’6” muscular athlete?

I have the same question about Luka. Seriously, I know I’m being pedantic, but I want to check out his daily logs on MyFitnessPal or something. How many slices of pizza? How many beers? What is the actual number? Despite all of this, Luka is still on pace to be a legend, and it’s sad that this is where we are right now.

Joel and Luka were the two principal leads in this year-long drama, but the broader narrative manifested in a number of smaller, but equally impactful ways.

The NBA recently implemented a rule where you have to play at least 65 games to be eligible for postseason awards. I supported this rule because it codified something that was already unspoken: most of the guys who win these awards play a bunch of games anyway. But even at the time, I thought the number was too high, and I thought 55 or 60³ games was the sweet spot.

This has been proven correct. The rule was meant to discourage load management— the practice of NBA stars sitting out games when it’s not medically necessary— but right now, the rule is punishing players who actually got hurt.

Of the players who could conceivably win one of these awards (for argument’s sake, the consensus top 30), 15 of them were ruled ineligible, including every player I’ve mentioned by name in this article. This shows the impact of the rule, but it also highlights just how dire the situation is. NBA players have never been more talented, and never been more fragile— they are passing rocks in glass houses.

Obviously, getting injured is not a personal failing, or a character flaw, and 99.999% of the time it’s not the players’ fault. But it’s a huge fucking problem.

Every year, we have the same argument about the All-Star Game. It used to be fun and important, but it sucks now, because the players don’t try. They can’t be bothered. And why would they? Why risk getting hurt for a game that is literally meaningless? We’ve sacrificed a lot at the altar of player health, but this game might be the most symbolically significant. It used to be exhilarating to watch the best players duke it out in this big annual celebration of the game. But now it’s a lame, boring slog.

I’m of the mind that the ASG is a relic of a bygone era, and should just be done away with. But tradition is important in sports, and I don’t blame the NBA for wanting to keep it around. I do blame them for coming up with weird, annoying ways to keep it interesting, but again, this is made necessary because the players won’t try.

And I just want to drive this home. The most talented and competitive people in the world, given an opportunity to test their mettle in front of the whole country, staunchly refuse to exert any effort. In fact, they are seemingly insulted by the suggestion. It’s insane, and it directly hurts their profession, and I just don’t get it.

In addition to the ASG, we’ve also sacrificed the integrity of the regular season. This also makes sense. Why go all out in a comparatively meaningless game in January, when you could save your energy for something more important?

And the NBA recognizes this too. The 65 game thing was not the only rule they came up with to discourage load management. They also came up with the Player Participation Policy, which mandated that if you have two “Star” players, both of them could not be ruled out of a nationally televised game, at least one of them had to play. And in this case, “Star” is an official title, someone who was voted to an All-Star and/or All-NBA team within the past two seasons.

I just want to be clear: nobody is asking these guys to play through serious injury, nobody is asking them to play every single second of every single game. The NBA asked that some of the best players were available for some of the most important games of the year. This is an extremely reasonable compromise.

It feels like it did nothing to solve the problem. There were several notable violations of the PPP, but I think the most absurd incident came in early March, when the Oklahoma City Thunder, the best team in the league, rested their entire starting lineup in a game for no reason, including their two designated Stars. It was rightfully seen as total bullshit by the league and the media. The NBA investigated them for it, but nothing came of it. This is not the end of the world, and it’s something the Thunder earned the ability to do by having an 11-game lead on the next best team in their conference. But when you openly defy reasonable rules like this, you are begging for further action.

The medical benefits of this type of rest and load management are unclear— with conflicting studies on whether it does anything to curb injuries— but the downsides are self-evident. It’s bad for the fans, bad for the league, bad for the game itself, and people really do hate it.

This season sucked. I’m glad it’s over. The problems I broke down here are not the only ones, but the current state of player health is the clearest narrative throughline. And it’s a story that has to have an ending soon.

1. Relative to roster talent and expectations.

2. Okay technically I live an hour and a half away from Philly but still in the Philly-Atlantic City Metro Area.

3. I think 50 games is within reason, but at that point we’re talking about missing almost half the season.