Basketball is both my favorite sport to watch and play. While recently watching a game Kyrie Irving, my favorite basketball player suffered a massive knee injury, which caused him to leave for the rest of the season. I’ve been playing basketball since the age of thirteen and I’ve been watching it since the age of five. Throughout my years of both playing and watching basketball I’ve seen many players and friends suffer from mainly leg injuries. With research I have found that in the U.S. basketball has the most injuries. Basketball has a total of 512,213 injuries throughout the year. Do the amount of games and the amount of minutes a player receives plays a role on why they receive injuries in their legs?

The NBA season consists of eighty-two games in a span of five months, not including the Playoff season and that can be more than the human body can handle. An analysis was performed on the NBA database from 1988-1989 through the 2004-2005 basketball seasons for league-sanctioned activities including rates of injury. Injury rates were calculated by total number of injuries multiplied by one thousand divided by total number of game exposures. It was a 17-year study and during that period there were 12,594 injuries reported. Of the injuries 6,287 occurred during an actual game. With the injuries stated researchers concluded that the ankle by far was the most common joint injured, comprising 1850 injuries and 14.7% of all injuries. Lateral ankle sprains counted for 8.8% of all games missed. Basketball has evolved to become a highly physical sport with a high rate of injury.

The demographics of the study display that the lower extremity was the most frequently injured body area accounting for 57.8% of all game related injuries. The upper extremity accounted for 19.3%. The torso and head areas both accounted for 10%. And the cervical spine accounted for 1.8% of injuries. In addition to injured areas, the demographics also display that players from 26 to 34 are most likely to get injured. Also the more experience you have the more likely you are to get injured; the more you weight and the taller you are leads to a higher risk of injury. What I do find interesting about the study is that the researchers failed to take into encounter the minutes the players receive and the positions of the players. I trust this information and consider it useful but we still don’t know enough to say who is most likely to get injured and how.

Prior to research, I would have never thought basketball has the most injuries or leg injuries because there are so many dangerous sports out there and basketball shoes are designed to protect your ankles and bring support. With the research provided it makes you question are basketball shoes really made to protect you.  Prolonged seasons mean all injury rates will increase. Basic basketball techniques such as the crossover, jumping for rebounds, and pivoting require a lot of leg and ankle movement. As we discussed in class the idea of the shoe supporting your ankle could be considered a soft end point. Not knowing how much movement the ankle needs can play a role in why there are many ankle injuries. I can agree with the study and see that with constant running, and pressure on your legs in a short span of time can cause many injuries. It seems that the study was observational but also controlled because only NBA players were examined.

I feel that I can trust the study but I don’t know if I can draw a conclusion on who’s most likely to get injured in the NBA and how. I trust the study because it’s from a credible source. The US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health published the study. Researchers took the right course of action by reviewing NBA players but should of taken into encounter their positions and the type of shoes the players were wearing. The study doesn’t suffer from the file drawer problem because it was published, but I feel that more research needs to be done. There could be another study conducted over a longer period of time to avoid flukes. You don’t want to receive any false negatives or false positives in your research. I wonder if all the other sports viewed in the U.S. such as NFL, NHL etc. had a similar schedule to that of the NBA if there would be more leg injuries reported.

Therefore, it is hard to determine who’s most likely to get injured in the NBA and how. A study was conducted on NBA players through the years of 1988 to 2005. In the end it was reported that a total of 12,594 injuries occurred and of those 6,287 were ankle injuries. Basketball is both my favorite sport to watch and play. With my years of experience leg injuries are something that I constantly hear about. With research, I feel that the NBA has the most leg injuries than any other sport but there isn’t enough information to help conclude that thought.