NBA Injury Roundup: What were the most common injuries in 2018-19?

 Look back at the most common injuries for NBA players during the 2019-20 season

Players get injured all the time. Some of the most pivotal moments in recent league history have been due to injury. Just in the last five years, countless Conference Finals or NBA Finals matchups have been decided, at least in part, due to injuries.

Entire seasons are thrown away from a key player planting their foot wrong or stepping on someone’s foot- and sadly, it seems that all the preventative care that teams can pay for doesn’t do the trick every time.

So, what were the most common injuries this season? I scraped Pro Sports Transactions and cleaned up the text a little bit in order to find out. Here’s the top 15:

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Injury: Count

• Knee: 107
• Ankle: 96
• Illness: 44
• Foot: 25
• Hamstring: 24
• Back: 20
• Hip: 16
• Groin: 12
• Toe: 12
• Achilles: 12
• Shoulder: 10
• Heel: 10
• Concussion: 10
• Calf: 10
• Lower back: 9

As we can see, six of the top 10 are leg injuries. Those injuries are not only the most common but the most costly in terms of larger chunks of time lost.

Of the 45 times when a player was deemed “out indefinitely,” it was for an ankle eight times, a knee seven times, and the MCL three times. (The website doesn’t always differentiate between various parts of the knee, so some of the 107 knee injuries are undoubtedly ACLs, MCLs, menisci, etc.)

Of the 68 times that a player was ruled out for the rest of the season, it was a knee injury 15 times, ankle eight times, foot four times, Achilles four times, and ACL three. So, leg injuries are certainly the most costly in basketball.

I’ll also quickly compare a few injury rates to the NFL just to put this year’s injuries into context. At any given time (not counting two-ways), the NBA has 450 players, and the NFL has 1696. So, on a per-player basis, below are some injury rates (higher rate is italicized):

Knee: NBA: 0.238; NFL: 0.106

Ankle: NBA: 0.213; NFL: 0.654

Foot: NBA: 0.055; NFL: 0.041

Hamstring: NBA: 0.053; NFL: 0.078

Concussion: NBA: 0.022; NFL: 0.042

Groin: NBA: 0.027; NFL: 0.019

Shoulder: NBA: 0.022; NFL: 0.026

Of course, because there is much less full-body contact in basketball, there are way fewer elbow, rib, quad, and head injuries, among others.

In the future, I’ll be writing a bit more on injuries, so stay tuned.