Eight of the first 11 players picked in 2014 NBA Draft have already experienced injuries, severe injuries in some cases. Something is broken in the process of developing elite basketball talent. If this was an bridge or a building, you would consider this level of mechanical breakdown to be a catastrophic failure. Teams, coaches and the players themselves seem too willing to go too hard, too rapidly trying to improve to NBA-level skills quality, probably not realizing that they also need to make physical advances to realize those skill advances. At the same time the young players undergo immense, multi-faceted lifestyle changes, from the sudden wealth to the new public demands to the travel ordeal that goes with playing an NBA schedule.
The first pick in the draft, Andrew Wiggins of the Minnesota Timberwolves, seems to have prepared to a level his peers have not. Wiggins has played all 24 of his team’s games. More important than what he is doing this year is what he did five years ago, what he did one year ago and what he did six months ago. Thomas Lam at FITS Toronto worked with Wiggins for much of his pre-college time. Wiggins chose to attend the University of Kansas in part because of the physical gains that strength coach Andrea Hudy has helped players to realize. And last summer Wiggins trained at P3 in Santa Barbara leading up to this season.
Wiggins should continue to improve as a player in no small part because he has minimized his injury risk over the years. His peers have probably been overworked and undertrained by their less informed AAU and university coaches, followed by quickly ramping up training to maximize the earning opportunity with the NBA draft, followed by ultra-intense summer league basketball, followed by not enough recovery time for the NBA season to come.
Anyone who says there is a single determining factor in the rookie injury problem will be wrong. It is the entire process that is broken, going back years before the time players hit an NBA court. If basketball talent development isn’t fixed then it fall to the NBA teams to rehab the rookies from the demands leading up to their first season, something that will put them out of sync with more experienced teammates and reduce their early career advancement opportunity, but probably does more for a young basketball player’s long-term best interests.