Key result
Injuries and illnesses were significantly associated with an earlier retirement age for NBA all-star players (median 33.94 vs 35.5 years, p<0.05), but not for regular players.
Why the study?
Whether the careers of all-star versus regular professional sports players depend differentially on injuries and age-related skill decline required verification in the NBA.
Observational (n=779)
Absolute Event Rate: 33.94% vs 35.5%
p-value: p=<0.05
Injuries and illnesses significantly affect the retirement age of NBA all-star players, whereas regular players' careers are mostly terminated based on skill.
Injuries may hasten retirement among elite NBA players; hypothesis-generating for performance-stratified prevention research.
Abstract Background: The careers of professional sport players are usually influenced by injuries and skills. The careers of all-star MBA and regular players depend on their health and how rapidly their skills diminish with age, respectively. Whether the above phenomena are considered and supported in the National Basketball Association (NBA) requires verification.Methods: We downloaded injury data from the NBA website in 2010–2018 and extracted all injury events (=9,783) involving 779 NBA players. Among these players, 705 were retired, 236 possessed all-star titles (60 injured and 170 non-injured), and 466 were regular players (408 injured and 58 non-injured) from 2010 to 2018. Both samples of retired all-star (n = 236) and regular players (n = 466) were compared to verify the effect of injury and illness on the retirement age using the bootstrapping method to estimate 95% confidence intervals in medians. We hypothesized that injuries and illnesses are associated with the retirement age of all-star players and irrelative to that of regular NBA players. Social network analysis(SNA) was performed to highlight the top three injuries with the highest degree centralities in their respective clusters.Results: We observed that the top three degree centralities include (1) sprained a left ankle, (2) sprained a right ankle, and (3) illness. The top two most injured NBA teams in 2010-2018, as obtained by the metrics for measurement, were Timberwolves (x-index = 32.86) and Hornets (x-index = 31.42). Most of the careers of NBA all-star players were affected by injuries/illnesses. The NBA careers of regular players were terminated mostly according to their skill.Conclusion: Although a number of things can be debated with regard to NBA, everyone can agree on one thing: Injuries are the worst. We confirmed that injuries and illnesses exhibit significant associations with the retirement age of all-star players and are irrelative to that of regular NBA players. Sports medicine is urgently needed to help players in preventing possible injuries while in the court in the discernable future.
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Chou et al. (2020) conducted an observational in Injuries and illnesses in professional basketball players (n=779). Injuries and illnesses vs. Non-injury was evaluated on Retirement age (p=<0.05). Injuries and illnesses were significantly associated with an earlier retirement age for NBA all-star players (median 33.94 vs 35.5 years, p<0.05), but not for regular players.
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