As a dad, I enjoy having in-depth philosophical discussions with my young daughter and not just about the Phoenix Suns.
We spend some of our time during morning drives to school or at night before bedtime with our fair share of ridiculous jokes and kids books. But mixed in we find ourselves discussing ideas like where did the universe start, are there truly bad people or just good people who make bad decisions or which came first the chicken or the egg.
The last query is always a fun thought experiment. Mostly because there is no answer that satisfies everyone or every part of the argument.
It reminds me of the discussion surrounding the Phoenix Suns and their injury issues. Are the injuries the result of the training staff or is the type of play to blame for making it next to impossible for training staffs to keep guys on the court?
The topic of injuries in the league has been debated for decades online without a real consensus as to the cause or the solution. Some people think the schedule should be shortened. Others feel that load management – the worst phrasing for any term in sports – is the solution. Still others think the NBA must do something about the three point line and the game’s reliance on it to help fix the style of play and thus the injuries that come from it.
My favorite faction is the one which automatically turns to the team’s training staff and places the blame at their feet any time a rash of injuries pop up out of nowhere, as if they were Beetlejuice after his name is said three times.
It’s not like taking a car to the mechanic for an oil change only to find out they never put the new oil in and it caused a catastrophic engine failure. Being an athletic trainer is as much art as it is science and you can never fully prevent something from happening within the human body.
“You can do a lot as an athletic trainer, just not to the point of making injuries disappear,” said Dr. Adam Annacone, former NBA Athletic Trainer and Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. “The real win is stacking the odds. Great staffs don’t promise prevention, they create a system where players are more prepared, setbacks are less common, and when something happens the path back is cleaner and safer.”
Setting Up Phoenix Suns Players For Success A Process
While injuries are inevitable during a season, there are things the training staff does to build a system that can put players in the best situation. Lots of factors are taken into consideration, but in its simplest form, like building something out of LEGO, it starts from the bottom up.
“You want to try and fix everything from the foundation and then work your way up globally,” former Phoenix Suns Head Athletic Trainer Aaron Nelson said. “The small things sometimes are the biggest things. It’s not a matter of, ‘can you increase your vertical by four more inches?’ Yes, but you have to get them stronger because if they jump higher they’ve got to go higher up and then come down. You want to set them up for success. You don’t want to set them up for injury.”
Setting them up for success is a lot more than simple measurements and workouts though. It includes the human element and figuring out how to not just get the athlete to hear you but understand how to help put themselves in a position for success as well.
“Every team does something a little bit different,” Nelson said. “We’re all trying to help our athletes the best way we can and it’s not just the technology we use, the workouts but it’s also the interaction with the athletes. Trying to help them understand, it’s not like, get over here, get on the machine, it’s time. There’s finesse.”
While they can work with the players to build an understanding and prepare them for what’s to come, sometimes injury is inevitable. The question is what exactly leads to that point during an 82-game season despite the work to mitigate it?
The simple answer is it’s just a byproduct of the current game. A game that is chaotic. One that asks more of the human body than ever before. A sport that is violent in a different way than the NFL – a way that takes its toll on hamstrings, hips, ankles and calves.
“The biggest drivers are a mix of how the game is played now and how the season is lived. The NBA is faster, more spaced out, and built around repeated max-effort bursts, hard sprints, violent stops, and quick re-accels, so hamstrings, calves, and hips take a beating,” Annacone shared. “Stack that on top of dense travel, weird sleep, and a lot of ‘always being ready,’ and you get athletes living closer to the edge. It’s not that people suddenly forgot how to train, it’s that the sport is asking for more high-intensity output more often, with less perfect recovery.”
Are Phoenix Suns Injuries As Bad As They Seem?
The reality in Phoenix is the players are being asked to do that more than most in the league this year. The Phoenix Suns are tied for the most back-to-back games in the NBA (16) this season meaning less time in the training room, weight room, on the practice court and resting. Add that to a more physical brand of basketball focused on defense this season under head coach Jordan Ott and it’s no wonder they’ve faced adversity.
While it feels like they’ve been “cursed” this season when it comes to injuries, the reality is that, according to Spotrac, there are 18 teams in the league that have has players miss more games due to injury so far this year. That’s including the over 40 games missed by Jalen Green this season and a myriad of injuries to Devin Booker, Grayson Allen and now Dillon Brooks.
One player whose first three seasons in the league were known more for being off the court due to injury than on it was Suns center Mark Williams. During his time in Charlotte he never once played more than 44 games in an entire season. In fact, his medicals supposedly looked so bad that the Los Angeles Lakers vetoed a trade involving him at the trade deadline in February of 2025. (Who knew Dr. Nick from The Simpson’s was the Lakers head of medicine?)
Despite that knowledge, the Phoenix Suns front office took a chance on the big man this offseason, getting him from the Hornets and entrusting their training staff to build the right plan to keep him on the court.
As of March 2, Williams had played in a career high 55 games and 1,300 minutes. A far cry from his time in the Queen City.
How did they do it? By bucking the trend and not fully leaning into the league’s load management fad. They instead did it by monitoring his minutes and putting him in situations advantageous to what his body could handle. Rather than shutting him down for swaths of time or having him miss multiple games, they were strategic to avoid the pitfalls of the approach many in the NBA have turned to.
“Load management can absolutely have unintended consequences if it turns into ‘less exposure’ instead of ‘smarter exposure,’” said Annacone. “Rest helps, but tissues also need consistent reps of the exact stuff that breaks them, high-speed running, sharp decels, chaotic changes of direction. If a guy gets protected, then suddenly has to ramp into a high-usage night or a stretch of heavy minutes, that spike can be the problem. The best versions of load management don’t just reduce minutes, they keep the athlete ‘game-ready’ by maintaining the right kinds of intensity in training so the jump back up isn’t a shock.”
It’s a success story for the Phoenix Suns despite a year that has involved random hamstring, hip, calf and ankle injuries. All things that can be viewed as the price of doing business in today’s NBA.
So are the injuries the result of the training staff or is the type of play to blame for making it next to impossible for training staffs to keep guys on the court?
I guess it’s not as confusing of a question as originally thought. You just have to ask the right people to see that there are multiple factors, and simply blaming the medical staff, while easy, isn’t likely the right approach.
Now if only someone could help my daughter and I on that chicken or the egg question, I might be able to sleep a little better at night. Does anyone know any experts?
