Andrew Unterberger

You’ve been wondering it. You’ve been reading about it everywhere. You’ve even heard commissioner David Stern ask the question himself during Game 4 of Bucks-Heat: “Is this the worst year ever [for injuries], or does it just seem like it?”

It’s a question worth asking. It seems like every couple of days, a new injury pops up that could affect the postseason — either just a series, or perhaps the entire title race. Just during the playoffs we’ve seen David Lee, Russell Westbrook, Tiago Splitter and Jeremy Lin suffer injuries that have kept them out of games or even longer. It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t feel like this was already the case for most of the NBA season, in which just about every team — particularly in the East — seemed to lose a key player for much or all of the regular season. (Except for the Heat, of course, because those guys got so good that they are now impervious to bad things happening to them.) And it wasn’t just relatively important role players that went down — it was also franchise players, league-defining superstars, and even a couple former MVPs who went down.

But is it actually that much worse this year? It seems like a lot for one season, but is that just a recency bias that doesn’t actually hold up to deep study of the injury situation of other regular seasons and playoffs?

I decided to look at the injury situations of the last five seasons and postseasons, to compare and contrast in order to see if this year really is far and away the worst in recent memory. I’ve listed all the major injuries suffered to key players for most or all the regular season or playoffs — “key players” being loosely defined as a top three player on a lottery-bound team, or a top-six player on a playoff-bound one, and “most” being more rigidly defined as more than half of the team’s games played. (The latter qualification unfortunately doesn’t count for important regular-season injuries such as Dirk’s 29 games missed for Dallas this season, or post-season injuries like Chris Bosh’s nine playoff games missed for Miami last year, but nearly every player gets injured for some amount of time over a season, and I had to draw the line somewhere to avoid filtering in too many less-consequential IR visits.) Players who already missed the entire previous season were not counted in a year’s tally, so Greg Oden gets listed no later than 2010, for instance.

Let’s begin with a look at this year, which obviously still has a ways to go:

2013:

Key players injured for most or all of regular season: Andrew Bynum, Anderson Varejao, Glenn Davis, Kevin Love, Chauncey Billups, Andrew Bogut

Injured for most or all of playoffs: Russell Westbrook, Danilo Gallinari, David Lee, Kobe Bryant, Jeremy Lin (if he misses Game 5)

Injured for most or all of both regular season and playoffs: Amar’e Stoudemire, Rajon Rondo, Danny Granger, Lou Williams, Derrick Rose

Number of All-Stars from the previous season (2012) to miss significant regular or postseason time: Six (Bynum, Bryant, Westbrook, Love, Rose, Rondo)

Number of injuries that affected the title chances of possible contenders: Four (Westbrook, Stoudemire, Gallinari, Rose)

Analysis: Obviously a ton to work with here. The six missing All-Stars is easily the most of any of the years I looked at, and that’s not even counting 2012 All-Stars like Dirk, Pau, Nash and Manu, all of whom missed notable regular season (and in Nash’s case, playoff) time, but not more than half their team’s games. The Westbrook and Rose injuries both have significant impacts on the playoff races in their respective conferences, and though you can argue whether the Nuggets were really title contenders even with Gallinari, or whether Amar’e's injury actually hurts the Knicks’ chances of contention, their injuries are not without postseason impact either.

Also worth noting are the Kevin Love and Andrew Bynum injuries, both of which arguably affected the playoff race by eliminating the Sixers and Timberwolves respectively from the equation altogether — were both healthy for all or much of the season, the two squads were likely to be postseason bound. And of course, there’s Kobe Bryant, whose injury probably affected the postseason little in the long run, but whose star power and league-wide recognition eclipses any other player to go down with a major injury in recent years. Really, only a missing LeBron James would compare in that respect, and that’s probably not happening anytime soon.

Now, let’s see how each of the last five seasons stack up injury-wise, by comparison:

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Is anything gonna be better than this Western Conference first round? I couldn’t have plotted it better myself — all four matchups are the exact ones I was hoping would shake out going into the final weeks of this regular season, not an obvious NBA TV series among them. (OK, maybe Warriors-Nuggets, but that’s more about the market sizes and lack of marquee players than any comment on the likely quality of the games themselves.) The four series should be filled with enough drama for an entire postseason, with player comebacks, long-simmering feuds, stylistic clashes, and a whole lot of across-the-board star power. It’s gonna be great, seriously.

But before that starts — like, TOMORROW — you gotta know your subplots for each series. Here are the five biggest for each of the Western Conference first-rounders.

OKLAHOMA CITY THUNDER (1) VS. HOUSTON ROCKETS (8)

1. James Harden vs. His old team.
Duh. This subplot is worth two or three regular subplots just on his own. The two teams behind the biggest trade of the season (technically last offseason, whatever) meeting up in the first round of the playoffs, with the biggest name moved in the deal taking his new team from the lottery to postseason respectability, and his old club prospering even further in his absence. And there’s absolutely no telling how Harden will perform in the series. In three regular-season games against the franchise that drafted him, Harden had 17 on 3-16 shooting, then 25 on 6-17 shooting, then 46 on 14-19 shooting. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a couple games of each in this series.

2. Sam Presti vs. Daryl Morey
Most debates about the league’s best GM will include these two guys at the forefront, the rare front-office types with visibility and name recognition on par of their head coaches and even some of their players. Even before they pulled off the biggest and least-expected trade of the year in tandem, they were associated with each other for their smart drafting, innovative cap-management techniques and ability to see both the short and the long game. But after the Harden deal and this upcoming first-rounder, they’ll likely be mentioned in the same sentence for the rest of their careers.

3. Derek Fisher vs. the Rockets
Yeah, technically Fish was an ex-Rocket (as were, of course, Kevin Martin and Jeremy Lamb, as well as Hasheem Thabeet for a minute there), but he never actually played a game in H-Town before being cut and re-routed to OKC, so that’s not why he’s listed here. Rather, he’s listed for this play in the 2009 postseason, where he responded to his Lakers getting muscled around by the tougher Rockets in their second-round matchup by absolutely decking Luis Scola (who probably flopped a decent amount, but still), then giving a kind of “What? Me worry?” head-scratch. The list of teams around the NBA that hate Derek Fisher for various reasons is a long one, and the Rockets’ case against him will likely only get stronger after he gives Jeremy Lin a forearm shiver this postseason (and somehow gets Lin called for a charge in the process).

4. Winston Garland Flashbacks.
Journeyman point guard and Leigh Ellis trading card favorite Winston Garland made the news last year for something he had done nearly two decades earlier, when he illegally snuck on to the court at the end of the Rockets’ Game Seven of the ’93 Western Conference Semifinals matchup with the then-Seattle SuperSonics, a minor and ultimately inconsequential cheat that went unnoticed until Ethan Sherwood Strauss noticed it and wrote about it for ESPN. Memories of the play and moment will be especially strong for one guy involved with this series: Thunder coach Scott Brooks, who was on the sideline right next to Garland when he made his out-of-bounds creep, and who played with the Rockets for two-and-a-half seasons, even winning a championship with them in ’94.

5. The divided loyalty of the Oklahoma City RedHawks.
The triple-A team of the Houston Astros — and a bunch of future stars they surely are — is based out of OKC, called the Oklahoma City RedHawks. Who will such part-time major leaguers as Jordan Lyles and Jimmy Paredes, or prospects like Jarred Cosart and Jonathan Villar, be rooting for in this series? In any event, the Triple A club should do a promotional scrimmage with the big league club at some point in this series. At best, the Astros would be 3:2 favorites.

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Only two days until the postseason now, thank the heavens. After a wild, 1,230-game regular season, we now have just 48 hours to mentally prepare ourselves for what should be the most epic postseason since … well, since the last one, but we’ve had some pretty epic postseasons lately, so no shame in that. Anyway, there are other places that’ll do a much better job than I could in breaking down the actual ins and outs of the eight upcoming first round matches, but I figured we should use this precious time we have to review the four or five all-important subplots that will dominate each respective series — the shared history, the bad blood, the geographical rivalries, etc.

Start with the East today, do the West tomorrow, and by Saturday we should all be properly prepared for the series four-to-seven-act plays that will be the first round of these NBA playoffs.

MIAMI HEAT (1) VS. MILWAUKEE BUCKS (8)

1. Ray Allen’s homecoming.
From the amount of coverage given to Hall of Fame sharp-shooter Ray Allen’s jumping ship to the Heat in the offseason, you’d think the Boston Celtics were the team he’d played with his entire career. But lest we forget, it was actually Milwaukee that Allen called home for six-and-a-half seasons — the longest stay for Allen with any of the four franchises he’s played for — and where he achieved his first real career success, leading the Bucks to the conference finals in 2001 in the team’s only visit to the NBA’s final four in the last quarter-century. It’s been over a decade since he left, so the response to Ray-Ray in Milwaukee probably won’t be hugely emotional, but expect to see a bunch of montages of a young Jesus Shuttlesworth draining threes and dunking (yes, Ray Allen used to dunk) in those hideous turn-of-the-century Bucks jerseys before all is said and done.

2. Dwyane Wade’s homecoming.
Wade never played for the Bucks, of course, but he did school for three years at Milwaukee’s Marquette University, just about a mile away from the Bradley Center, where he led the Golden Eagles to the Final Four in his breakout 2003 campaign. The school remains close enough to Wade’s heart that it was considered his stop on the Heat’s recent “Reunion Tour,” which also included stops to Toronto (Chris Bosh), Boston (Ray Allen) and Cleveland (LeBron James) — though the fact that the crew didn’t even seem to remember that Ray once played for Milwaukee too should tell you all you need to know about the distance of that relationship.

3. Does Monta Ellis really have it all?
In an oft-quoted local TV segment (turned viral video) from this year, the Bucks combo guard memorably opined that he was on the same level as D-Wade as a baller, with the only difference between the two being Wade’s “more wins and two championships. Besides that, of course, MontyElly have it all. The skepticism expressed by many to the veracity of this claim is something Ellis could theoretically put to rest with an excellent series against his supposed NBA peer, though given Monta’s scoring averages in the Bucks’ four games against the Heat this year — 9.5 ppg on 30.2 percent (!!!) shooting — betting on the haters would probably be the smart move here.

4. Blue Devil “Jeopardy!” Showdown.
The Heat’s Shane Battier and the Bucks’ Mike Dunleavy, likely to be matched up on the court at some point during the series, were once teammates at Duke, both helping to lead the team to their ’01 championship. The two players’ intra-squad feud even stretched to this year, where Dunleavy publicly doubted Battier’s claim that he could beat any fellow NBAer in “Jeopardy!,” saying “I don’t know if he could beat Duke players … I don’t think he could beat me.” (Battier’s response: “Michael knows better … I’m ready any time, any place. Tell Dunleavy, tell Grant Hill, you know where to find me.”) Could make for some good halftime entertainment at one of the games. Coach K would probably even make a pretty good Trebek.

5. The Battle for Ryan Braun.
The best hitter in the National League has shown sporadic support for Milwaukee’s other pro sports team, showing up courtside for the team’s game against the Thunder a couple weeks back, and even rolling with fellow Wisconsin hero Aaron Rodgers to a game a couple years ago. However, Braun is not without his South Beach connections either, having attended the University of Miami for three years before being drafted by the Brewers in ’05. The best athletes are always notorious front-runners, especially if they have a lame personal reason to do so, so don’t be surprised if Braun shows up at one of the Bucks games wearing a throwback Heat cap or something.

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