As Tyrese Haliburton pounded his fists against the hardwood, everybody knew what happened just based on their gut reaction. Multiple replays that showed a ripple effect on the back of his calf just confirmed those nasty suspicions.
Playing on a strained calf, Haliburton’s risky gamble blew up. The Indiana Pacers likely lost their franchise player for next season to a torn Achilles. That hung over them the rest of the 2025 NBA Finals Game 7 as the Oklahoma City Thunder captured their first championship.
Haliburton joined Jayson Tatum and Damian Lillard as All-Star players who suffered a torn Achilles. The aftermath has been catastrophic for all three NBA franchises. The Milwaukee Bucks stretched and waived Lillard. The Boston Celtics shipped away Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis in a gap year.
Despite being on the good side of injury luck in the playoffs, Sam Presti says the NBA can’t play dumb. There’s a clear correlation between workload and an uptick in injuries. Instead of running a victory lap over his first championship, the OKC GM got on his soapbox in his 2024-25 end-of-season press conference.
“Yeah, I just think there’s certainly something to be learned from the injuries. It’s a couple years in a row now that we’ve been in the postseason and the best players on certain teams aren’t playing,” Presti said. “I think the one thing we have to do is get away from the defensive nature of trying to convince people, players, and teams that there’s no connection between the loads and the injuries.”
If anybody knows about lengthy seasons, it’s the Thunder. They played nine months of basketball and two months of highly intense playoff basketball that went the distance, thanks to the NBA’s first NBA Finals Game 7 in nearly a decade. The champion even played an unofficial 83rd game in the 2024 NBA Cup.
“We’re kind of bordering on a level of — it’s almost insulting. It doesn’t mean it’s anyone’s fault. It doesn’t mean we don’t want our best players playing every single night. It’s not a matter of players not wanting to play or being soft or anything like that,” Presti said. “But I don’t think we should be putting our head in the sand and acting as if there’s no correlation.”
This is almost a shot at NBA commissioner Adam Silver. He recently told ESPN there isn’t a correlation between games played and injuries. He even said he doesn’t believe the regular season’s length plays a role in injuries, which is difficult to believe when there are weeks of jam-packed schedules.
Presti later brought up the good point that the average role player does so much more now than they did 20 years ago. 3-point specialists no longer exist. Anybody who enters the NBA knows they must be good at almost everything to carve out a career.
“The reason is why, because if we’re pointing to data, the data is from 20 years ago or 10 years ago. The game is a totally different sport than it was even several years ago because of the amount of possessions, the way the offenses work now, it’s not people standing around the three-point line waiting for double-teams and then the ball to be kicked out,” Presti said. “There’s so much involvement on every possession where we’re playing almost two games compared to 10 years ago and how involved the bodies are.”
Silver’s addition of the 65-game rule for awards and the NBA Cup has caused traffic jams in the second half of the regular season. January and March are the NBA’s busiest months. That’s when most teams play their most back-to-backs and three-games-in-four-nights. It puts most team’s best players’ stamina meter near empty by the time the playoffs roll around.
“Then you take into consideration the fact that everyone is trying to play as much as possible because of the 65-game rule. Then you take into consideration that the back half of the schedule is more condensed than it has been in the last 10 years because the In-Season Tournament cannot have back-to-back games on those days,” Presti said. “So you’ve got much less flexibility in the schedule, a game that’s really red lining compared to past seasons in terms of the overall movement and torque on your body, the uptick in physicality that we have because that’s where we want the game to go.”
Everything Presti has said is valid. As one of the best GMs in the NBA, what he says matters more than the usual person in the NBA ecosystem. Perhaps Silver will take the feedback well. The Thunder and the rest of the league would be way better off.