Watching the Orlando Magic lose to the Minnesota Timberwolves on Thursday, in the Magic’s final game without their best player, I was reminded of the spring of 2022.
The 2021–22 Golden State Warriors are one of the coolest title-winners of the century, a once-proud team of game-shifting veterans separated from their last title by four years of horrid injuries, shambolic losses, and failed experiments coming together for one last job and defeating the Boston Celtics of all teams in the only competitive Finals out of the past three, one that featured a genuine masterpiece by an all-time great. Consider how the Warriors won that title: Andrew Wiggins basically doubled his career rebounding percentage, they got a little lucky that the Celtics had to survive two seven-game wars and weren’t quite the totally optimized juggernaut they are now, and, I would argue most importantly of all, everyone got healthy at the right time. In other words, everyone got hurt at the right time. Draymond Green missed January and February with a back thing, Otto Porter had the one functional season of his post-Wizards career, and Steph Curry sat out the final month of the regular season with an ankle issue. When the games mattered most, everyone was fresh.
I’d argue health timing is even more important now than just a few years ago. Over the past three seasons, the defining shift in competitive balance within the NBA regular season has been toward parity. I would chalk this up to three factors: An 82-game season is too long, the league is generally more talented now, and that talent is distributed more evenly thanks to the anti-competitive CBA that the NBPA agreed to two summers ago. The competitive framework of the current NBA means that the talent level of your fourth- or fifth-best player matters more now than it ever has.
At least in the regular season, that is. The playoffs are still the province of superstars. The trick, then, is to win enough games in the interminable regular season without compromising your stars for the playoffs; to build a team such that you can not only survive an injury but use the possessions newly freed up by one to give your more peripheral players chances to grow (it helps that many of the games in this middle chunk of the season will be between two teams with some number of hurt players). Injuries are not generally something you can control, though they are an omnipresent part of the game. Therefore injury luck, on the team level, is less a matter of avoiding injuries altogether and more about having your best players healthy by spring.
So, here in mid-January, whose timing looks the best? The Magic are the obvious case study here. Every game they’ve played for the last month has featured one of their starters losing a limb, as they beat a playoff team by double digits and hold them under 100. Paolo Banchero and Franz Wagner have both been out with right oblique tears, Moe Wagner tore his ACL, and Jalen Suggs is out with a back strain. In the months since they have had to play shorthanded, Wagner blossomed into a comfortable lead ballhandler before he croaked, Suggs became more comfortable initiating offense before he went down, and the team’s supporting players like Anthony Black and Goga Bitadze have played well enough to keep the team fourth in the East.
Banchero returns on Friday after missing 34 games, and while Suggs and Wagner are still out, the Magic are in a great spot. The offense is going to run through Banchero, who is young and athletic enough that Magic fans can feel optimistic about his chances of being fresh in April.
The Mavericks are another good candidate here, as they’ve won two in a row without both Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving. Those wins have been characterized by Spencer Dinwiddie and Quentin Grimes stepping up, and while Doncic and Irving will run the show in the playoffs, every team needs more than two capable ballhandlers. You could make the case for the Thunder with Chet Holmgren and Alex Caruso, the Clippers with Kawhi Leonard, and Memphis with Ja Morant; conversely, you could arch a skeptical eyebrow at every Knicks starter playing approximately 48 minutes per game, though this theory is a March and April one, not really a January one, so it’s probably still too early to make any meaningful pronouncements. Beyond those relating to the Magic, that is, who will hopefully stop losing good players to increasingly horrific maladies.
