Lakers F LeBron James made his season debut yesterday, and there is hope that his return \u201chelps reverse a startling trend across the league\u201d as the NBA\u2019s star availability problem has \u201csomehow worsened this season,\u201d according to Tom Haberstroh of YAHOO SPORTS. NBA stars have \u201calready missed over 200 games\u201d this season due to injury or illness, \u201cdoubling the total\u201d at this point two years ago. <\/p>\n
This season, 45 players meet the criteria for the league\u2019s official star designation, which means that stars have already been sidelined \u201cabout five games each\u201d on average. For a league \u201cfighting the image that star players aren\u2019t playing enough,\u201d this season\u2019s \u201cpower outage is especially alarming.\u201d In 2023-24, with the Emirates Cup\u2019s first year \u201cseeming to motivate its biggest names to suit up,\u201d star players played 87.2% of its games by this juncture of the season. Last season, it \u201cdipped to\u201d 82.6%. This season, the bottom \u201chas fallen out,\u201d with star participation \u201cfalling to\u201d 67.6%. Injury tracker database InstreetClothes.com analyst Jeff Stotts found that games lost due to injury for all players do not \u201cseem to be significantly up\u201d across the league compared to last season. On Monday, Stotts reported that total games lost due to injury or illness \u201creached 964 games\u201d compared to 968 at this point last year. League stakeholders \u201choping that last season was an aberration have to be disappointed with the data so far\u201d (YAHOO SPORTS, 11\/18<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lakers F LeBron James made his season debut yesterday, and there is hope that his return \u201chelps reverse…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295340,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[169428,64,63,726,590,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-295339","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-athlete-performance","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-basketball","12":"tag-nba","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}