How sports Injuries Impact Athlete Performance in NBA Basketball

With watching basketball, especially the NBA maintains such popularity, teams strive to become better, win more, and win prize money. With such high stakes, players push themselves to the limit, leading to injuries, disproportionately affecting hamstrings, knees, and ankles From 2018-2024, total missed games in the NBA has increased by about 30%. Source

This page will help all basketball watchers, coaches,and analysts to understand NBA team performances in the face of injuries and draw insights and conclusions simple sports statistics

NBA Injuries

This Medium article hypothesises that this dramatic increase in injuries is from modern day training inadequacy, without enough emphasis on traditional weight training.

img

There is a large amount of total games missed. Summing all these values together, we get a total of 11909 games missed, divided by thirty teams, which is an average of 397 games missed total per team (rounded to the nearest thousandth).From this data, I can find the top five teams with the most missed games, the Brooklyn Nets, Philadelphia 76ers, Atlanta Hawks, Charlotte Hornets, New Orleans Pelicans. Source

img img img img

NBA has 30 teams, each plays 82 games = 2460 games Half of the games won, so 1230 wins total. This is record for the year of 2025. Average wins per team = 1230/30 = 41 wins per team.

Source
one two three four five

This a deduction based off of the data provided. Missed games for each team is compiled, and subtracted from the average missed games. The total wins for each team is also given. Then, can be subtracted from average games won to find the difference in games won.

final

With an r squared value of .302, 30% of the variation in wins from average is explained by missing games. There is a moderate negative correlation; as missed games increases, the number of wins also decreases.

Conclusion

In conclusion, injuries have a noticable moderate negative impact on team performance in the NBA. Teams with more missed games tend to have fewer wins, proven by the negative correlation. The importance of protecting player health is crucial for the success of an NBA team. When a user is given the data about missed games per team, and also they are given the amount of wins per team, they can make predictions about what teams will do well in the season. It could also be used for sports betting purposes, or just as a way to see if predictions are correct.