Is Jayson Tatum’s Achilles injury the cost of the modern game and increasing physicality?

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In Game 6 of the 2019 NBA Finals, Klay Thompson went up for a dunk and came back down never the same.

Thompson’s left knee buckled during an awkward landing under the rim against the Toronto Raptors. In the blink of an eye, the course of Thompson’s career and the Golden State Warriors had forever changed. Thompson’s ACL was torn, and so was his place as the Warriors’ constant.

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Thompson had been the Warriors’ flame-throwing metronome, a five-time All-Star with a gritty resiliency that few could match. He had never suffered a major injury or anything serious enough to knock him out for anything beyond a handful of games. And then, the big injury. And another, when his Achilles ruptured during his rehab.

That was on my mind when Jayson Tatum crumbled to the ground on Monday night in Game 4 of the Eastern Conference semifinals. How sudden and unexpected it was. How unfamiliar it was. This wasn’t an injury-prone star, far from it. From a health standpoint, Tatum was the Boston Celtics’ version of Klay Thompson, always there in time of need.

Another ominous line that connects the two stars: Thompson was the last player who played as many games as Tatum did through his first eight seasons in the league. At the end of his eighth season, Thompson broke down. Like Tatum, Thompson was his team’s iron man. Until, in a flash, he wasn’t.

This is the new NBA. Whether you’re injury-prone or an iron man, a game that is geometrically expanding and seemingly becoming more physical is taking its toll on the brightest stars. No matter how clean a player’s track record, the growing churn of the NBA grind seems to spare no one. Stars in today’s pace-and-space era are getting injured in the postseason more than ever.

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Is today’s game itself to blame?

Tatum’s peerless workload

When Tatum went down, the All-NBA wing hadn’t shown any warning signs. The 6-foot-8 champion was busy putting the finishing touches on one of the greatest postseason outings of his career: 42 points, 8 rebounds, 4 steals, 4 assists and 2 blocks, while primarily guarding the opposing center, Karl-Anthony Towns, a man who’s 40 pounds heavier.

He was doing this all while approaching a personal milestone. Before trying to lunge toward a loose ball in Monday’s Game 4, Tatum had in his sights a remarkable threshold: 25,000 minutes played. He had logged 24,916 minutes across 706 games in his NBA career, including his postseason action as a member of the Celtics. That’s an average of 35 minutes per game — for 88 games per season — for eight seasons straight. And squeezing Olympics action in there, too.

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To put it in perspective, since Tatum was drafted in 2017, no player in the NBA has played more minutes or more games than the former Duke standout. Not LeBron. Not Nikola Jokić. Not anyone. In fact, Tatum, the No. 3 pick in the 2017 draft, has played more minutes than any player in the 2016 draft class as well, including some 2,000 more minutes than his teammate Jaylen Brown, who was selected by the Celtics with the third pick a year prior.

Tatum had been the rock-solid foundation of the Celtics, having missed only one postseason game ever, and that came in Game 2 of this year’s first-round series against Orlando (a wrist injury). The 27-year-old has already made five conference finals, which is more miles on the tires than most players accrue in their entire careers. In fact, Tatum has absorbed a larger workload — measured in minutes and games — than the guy he was guarding, Towns, who was drafted while Tatum was still in high school.

Ultimately, Tatum’s leg gave out under all the weight. But he’s not alone in being on the receiving end of this devastating news. Tatum is the sixth player in the NBA to suffer an Achilles tear this season, joining former All-Stars Damian Lillard and Dejounte Murray along with Miami’s Dru Smith and Indiana’s James Wiseman and Isaiah Jackson. That list doesn’t include Denver Nuggets first-round pick Da’Ron Holmes, whose Achilles ruptured during NBA Summer League.

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And if it feels like star players as a whole are missing playoff games due to injury more often these days, that’s because they are.

Are Thompson and Tatum becoming the norm?

Thompson’s ACL tear didn’t start a new trend, but star injuries began to spike around the same time of the KD-Warriors’ run atop the league. (In the same series that Thompson went down, Kevin Durant tore his Achilles.) In years since, we’ve seen a whopping 40 instances of an All-Star missing playoff games.

More recently, Tatum and Lillard are two of five players who played in the 2025 All-Star Game who have missed at least one game due to injury so far this postseason. When he misses Game 5 on Wednesday, Tatum is set to join Darius Garland (4), Stephen Curry (3) and Lillard (2) to have missed multiple games due to injury, while Evan Mobley missed one.

Star absences in the postseason weren’t really a thing in the 1990s even if we account for the shorter five-game opening rounds. Sure, there was the occasional Larry Bird or Isiah Thomas absence, but they happened only ever so often. To get a sense of how different the modern era has been, consider that in a five-year span from 1994 to 2000 (there was no All-Star game in 1999), there were four injured All-Stars combined, which is fewer than we’ve witnessed in this single postseason — or, actually, any of the postseasons since 2018.

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When we look at the rolling five-season averages, the startling trend becomes even more glaring. Heading into this postseason, the NBA averaged seven injured All-Stars over the previous five postseasons, a rate that has increased more than sevenfold since the late 1990s (0.8 per season) and more than threefold since 2008 when the league had averaged just two injured All-Stars over the previous five seasons.

And these aren’t one-game absences either. Beyond the knick-knack injury, Curry will have missed four straight games with his hamstring strain while Tatum and Lillard’s injuries are severe enough to be considered career-altering. The injuries are piling up, and we haven’t even reached the conference finals yet.

So what’s going on?

The expanding geometry of the NBA game

We’ll never know exactly what ultimately drove Tatum’s Achilles tendon to snap in that moment. But we do know that he was being asked to do some pretty uncharacteristic things in this series. Tatum was the primary defender on Towns, guarding the Knicks center for a game-high 32 percent of Towns’ minutes on the floor, according to NBA.com player-tracking data.

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Tatum’s assignment on the 7-foot Towns is representative of a growing expansion of the game’s geometry. The wing player was tasked with banging down low and wrestling with Towns for rebounds, while also staying with him when he ventured out to the perimeter where Towns is comfortable launching from 30 feet. Guards are centers and centers are guards. Towns leads a growing trend of stretch 5s which demands a defender to follow the big man for a much larger surface area on the floor. Whether it’s Nikola Jokić in Denver, Chet Holmgren in OKC or Myles Turner in Indiana, having a stretch 5 is the norm for title contenders now. Hell, Draymond Green is averaging more 3-point attempts in this series (5.8) than Reggie Miller did in his postseason career (5.7).

Notably, the rise of the 3-point shot across the league has run parallel with the increase in player injuries, but there’s also a third variable: player movement. According to recent research from Sportico’s Lev Akabas, NBA players are covering about 9% more distance per minute on court than they did a decade ago. Akabas wrote in his post: “It’s no surprise that the more miles a player puts on his body, the more likely he is to get injured.”

Is physicality to blame?

There has been a lot of talk about the increased physicality in this year’s postseason. It seems the referees have been letting the players get away with contact, and it appears at times that players are playing a sport resembling football, wrestling for position all over the floor. Jaylen Brown was alarmed by the officials’ loose whistle in the Orlando series.

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“There might be a fight break out or something,” Brown said, “because it’s starting to feel like it’s not even basketball and the refs are not controlling their environment.”

Chris Finch, the head coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves, agreed with Brown’s assessment.

“To me, they’ve gone way too far on the physicality,” Finch told reporters recently. “In general, it’s gone too far.”

The physicality has come at a cost especially on acrobatic plays under the basket with players crashing down to the hardwood. Tatum, Butler and Ja Morant all suffered injuries after mid-air collisions at the rim this postseason.

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Physicality has traditionally been an unquantifiable intangible that has eluded any sort of rigorous study. But Roland Beech, the former Dallas Mavericks director of analytics and longtime proprietor of 82games.com, has recently returned to the public sphere with ground-breaking research on physicality. By hand-charting over 40 different forms of contact (pushes, shoves, stiff arms, etc.) across multiple postseasons, Beech has come away with promising evidence that today’s NBA may be more physical than previously understood.

Though the research is in the early stages, Beech has come away with a deeper understanding of the more nuanced impacts of modern spacing, which allows players to have clearer drivelines and generate higher velocities at the rim. With longer runways, the players are taking flight more often in the halfcourt and often crashing to the floor.

“There is little doubt not just the number of falls has gone up,” Beech concluded on 82games.com, “but the number of severe falls is also higher in the current times due, we speculate, in part to the higher speeds and forces involved when collisions occur.”

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It has always been taken as an article of faith that games in the 1990s were more physical than today’s game. However, Beech’s research has begun to put that assertion under the microscope by tracking hours and hours of actual game film.

According to Beech’s research, the 2024 postseason saw 39.3 falls per game which was 3.8 more than what he observed in 20 playoff games from the 1990s. Some of that might be exaggerated contact or flopping, but in an interview this week with the Basketball Illuminati podcast, Beech told me that flopping isn’t a new tactic and he observed plenty of it in his sessions watching old film.

Moreover, the research has unveiled serious consequences not only to player health but also our understanding of the game.

“I think it’s a game-changer,” Beech said. “We all know about shot-making. Shot-making has a huge effect on games, but physicality is underlying a lot of what’s happening.”

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Beech understands that some of these objective measures may be more art than science, but the physicality aspect of the game will be a key part in untangling the web of increasing player injuries.

On its surface, a more physical game seems like an element that many want. But all the body blows, hard landings to the floor and constant shoving matches inevitably bear a tax on the human body. Combined with the larger geometric demands of the sport, Tatum and other star players are finding there may be a devastating cost to the modern game.

This news was originally published on this post .

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