Is the Modern NBA Breaking Its Stars?
The NBA is in the midst of a leg plague, with a growing number of players missing a growing number of games due to lower-body soft-tissue injuries. These injuries are dangerous for players, disappointing for fans, and destructive for the league. So why are they occurring so often?
The rise of the stepback 3 and the Euro-step is not a random trend. As the NBA learned that the smartest shots on the floor happen at the rim and from beyond the arc, creative players have developed and iterated on moves that generate those opportunities. Being able to create and convert their own shots from 3 or at the basket is what makes someone a superstar. But is the way they’re going about it risky?
The modern NBA is a pace-and-space machine—100-plus possessions a night, built on rapid ball movement, floor spacing, and the core principle that any player must be able to create offense off the dribble from anywhere. The epicenter of NBA offense has migrated from the low block to the perimeter, where endless drive-and-kick sequences stack on top of one another. Twenty-five years ago, if you were 6-foot-9 and 260 pounds, you lived in the post; now you live on the edge, like everyone else.
Today’s game of relentless one-on-one creation; guards, wings, and increasingly centers attacking closeouts; and transition offense requires a different kind of movement. It requires rapid changes of speed and direction. And almost all of it happens off one foot.
The calf, for instance, is particularly vulnerable to this combination because of our anatomy. The calf muscle has pretty short fibers, all things considered. When the ankle rotates and the knee extends at the same time, it puts immense strain on the muscle.
That strain is amplified for bigger players. My calf and Shaq's calf have about the same length of fibers, but he just has maybe 10 times what I have. The fibers don't scale with the body. The bones—the levers—do. So a bigger person, when they rotate their knee joint or their ankle joint 20 degrees, they stretch their muscles relatively more.
The same move, performed by a larger body, is more dangerous. Not because the player is weaker, but because the geometry is worse. That’s bad news for a league that’s demanding that larger and longer players increasingly add false steps, stepback 3s, and Euro-steps to their repertoires.
In the spring of 2026, the NBA is Euro-stepping its way to a tipping point, and unless it decelerates and pivots soon, it’s going to get hurt. Personally, I think the NBA needs to cut down on the number of games, make games shorter, and/or add more rest in between them. But all of these solutions pit revenue against player wellness, and in a league increasingly driven by billionaires and tycoons, that’s probably not great news for hamstrings and calves.
