The San Antonio Spurs are headed to the Emirates NBA Cup semifinals after defeating the Los Angeles Lakers 132-119 on Wednesday, and might have Victor Wembanyama back in the lineup for the big tournament matchup. Following the team’s quarterfinal victory over the Lakers, Spurs head coach Mitch Johnson to reporters that Wemby might be ready to make his return from injury over the weekend.

“Very much so,” coach Johnson said. “He had a really good day today. He had a very intense day this morning, and we’ll have to see how he responds or reacts (Thursday).” 

Wemby went through an intense workout Wednesday morning and then worked out again during pregame warmups before the Lakers game. He was able to get through that workout without any extra protection on his strained calf, according to Johnson. 

Wembanyama has been sidelined with his calf strain and hasn’t played since Nov. 16. However, the Spurs have been able to get through this stretch and post a 9-3 record without their All-Star big man and defensive anchor. Wemby’s potential return couldn’t come at a better time as the Spurs will face the defending NBA Champion Oklahoma City Thunder in the NBA Cup semifinals in Las Vegas on Saturday.

[Get more Spurs news: San Antonio team feed]

In Wembanyama’s absence, other players like 2024-25 Rookie of the Year Stephon Castle have had to step up even more to help carry the load. In Wednesday’s win over the Lakers, Castle scored 30 points, grabbed 10 rebounds, and dished 6 assists. De’Aaron Fox chipped in with 20 points, and Keldon Johnson scored 17 off the bench.

“I think Victor would tell you we have a deep team, and we rely upon playing together as a team,” Johnson said. “He may be the biggest puzzle piece, but he needs everybody else to complete the puzzle.”

Although Wemby has missed half of San Antonio’s 24 games this season, the Spurs are 17-7 overall and currently fifth in the Western Conference. When Wembanyama is on the court, he’s been as dominant as ever this season, averaging career-highs of 26.2 points and 12.9 rebounds per game, along with 3.6 blocks.

San Antonio and OKC square off in the Emirates NBA Cup semifinals on Saturday in Las Vegas. The NBA Cup championship game will be played Tuesday in Las Vegas. 

With Edwin Diaz leaving the Mets to sign a three-year deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers, right-hander Robert Suarez appeared to be a prime target to pair with Devin Williams at the back end of the bullpen. 

But that possibility ended on Thursday, with Suarez signing with the NL East rival Atlanta Braves.

Per multiple reports, the two-time All-Star, who has the most saves in the majors over the past two seasons, is joining the Braves on a three-year, $45 million deal.

The Braves also re-signed Raisel Iglesias earlier this offseason, giving them a formidable one-two punch to close out games.

The 34-year-old Suarez, who didn’t make his major league debut until he was 31, has been an All-Star in each of the last two seasons, pitching to a 2.87 ERA with 76 saves and a 0.973 WHIP since the start of 2024. 

Suarez features three-pitch mix, including a fastball that averaged 98.6 miles per hour last season, which was in the 97th percentile via Baseball Savant. Suarez also has a nasty changeup that had opposing batters whiffing 32.8 percent of the time in 2025, and a sinker that held opposing hitters to a .102 batting average.

With Suarez off the board, names like Pete Fairbanks, Kenley Jansen, and Kirby Yates remain as back-end options for the Mets.

The Atlanta Braves and closer Robert Suarez have agreed to a three-year, $45 million deal, the team announced Thursday.

According to the Braves, Suarez will earn $13 million next season and $16 million in each of the final two years of the contract. He will also donate 1% of his salary to the team’s foundation.

The 34-year-old Suarez has spent his entire four-season MLB career with the San Diego Padres. He made 70 appearances during the 2025 season, recording a career-high and National League-leading 40 saves in 69.2 innings pitched. The right-hander’s production has earned him two straight appearances on the NL All-Star team.

Suarez’s 76 saves since 2024 are the most in all of MLB and is five more than Emmanuel Clase of the Cleveland Guardians.

In November, Suarez opted out of his contract, which had two years and $16 million remaining. Since he was not given a qualifying offer, there is no draft pick compensation coming to the Padres.

The addition of Suarez, one of the best relievers on the market, strengthens the Braves’ bullpen. Last month, they re-signed Raisel Iglesias, who has recorded 96 saves in Atlanta over the past three seasons.

According to MLB.com’s Mark Bowman, Suarez will serve as the setup man with Iglesias remaining the team’s closer.

As they sought more help in the bullpen, Yahoo Sports’ Russell Dorsey reports that the Braves had looked at reliever Devin Williams before he signed with the New York Mets.

The Atlanta Braves and closer Robert Suarez have agreed to a three-year, $45 million deal, the team announced Thursday.

According to the Braves, Suarez will earn $13 million next season and $16 million in each of the final two years of the contract. He will also donate 1% of his salary to the team’s foundation.

The 34-year-old Suarez has spent his entire four-season MLB career with the San Diego Padres. He made 70 appearances during the 2025 season, recording a career-high and National League-leading 40 saves in 69.2 innings pitched. The right-hander’s production has earned him two straight appearances on the NL All-Star team.

Suarez’s 76 saves since 2024 are the most in all of MLB and is five more than Emmanuel Clase of the Cleveland Guardians.

In November, Suarez opted out of his contract, which had two years and $16 million remaining. Since he was not given a qualifying offer, there is no draft pick compensation coming to the Padres.

The addition of Suarez, one of the best relievers on the market, strengthens the Braves’ bullpen. Last month, they re-signed Raisel Iglesias, who has recorded 96 saves in Atlanta over the past three seasons.

According to MLB.com’s Mark Bowman, Suarez will serve as the setup man with Iglesias remaining the team’s closer.

As they sought more help in the bullpen, Yahoo Sports’ Russell Dorsey reports that the Braves had looked at reliever Devin Williams before he signed with the New York Mets.

Tyrese Haliburton tried to heal his right calf strain in time for the biggest game of his life, Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals.

Multiple hyperbaric chamber sessions per day. H-Wave electrical stimulation. Treatment around the clock. All that seemed to work. The opening minutes of Game 7 became The Tyrese Haliburton Show. The two-time All-Star sank three straight 3-pointers to pull the Pacers ahead 14-10. To the undiscerning eye, his calf seemed just fine.

And then, the show ended.

At the five-minute mark of the first quarter, the largest tendon in Haliburton’s body snapped as he pushed off his right heel to accelerate forward. His worst fears were realized: an Achilles tear proximate to the same damaged right calf. He pounded the hardwood in disbelief. With Haliburton sidelined, the Thunder pulled away late and won by 12.

Hunched on crutches in the hallway after the game, Haliburton greeted his teammates and was met with hugs and tears. Little did we know, his injury didn’t just disrupt the 2025 NBA Finals; it also disrupted the entire NBA landscape. Like an earthquake that sends shockwaves for months, Haliburton’s torn Achilles that was preceded by a calf strain — on top of the Achilles tears of Damian Lillard and Jayson Tatum in the injury-marred 2025 postseason — fundamentally changed the way teams are operating this season. And not just the Pacers, who have fallen to 6-18 without their star.

Ja Morant. Victor Wembanyama. Giannis Antetokounmpo. All suffered calf strains in the opening weeks of the season. All sidelined for multiple weeks. They are the biggest names, but there are more. A lot more. In the first 20 games of the 2025-26 season, we’ve seen a substantial increase in calf injuries (excluding contusions caused by blunt force), according to leading injury expert Jeff Stotts of InStreetClothes.com. This time last season, there were 18 calf injuries at the 20-game mark. This season, it’s up to 25 incidents, representing an increase of nearly 40%.

More significant, however, is the elongated recovery timeline of these injuries. Per Stotts’ data, the number of games lost due to calf injuries, through 20 games played, skyrocketed from 36 to 108. A tripling of last season’s total.

Luka Dončić was traded, in part, because of his recurring calf strains in Dallas. Antetokounmpo may be the next example, as the NBA world tries to decipher how his recent history of calf strains will affect his future. No one wants to have another Haliburton situation — most of all, the players.

Something has changed. But pinpointing exactly what is a mystery that has perplexed NBA teams, fans and the medical community.

Based on the injury data and conversations throughout the league with Yahoo Sports, these have become the two scariest words in basketball:

Calf strain.

‘The NBA is very concerned’

Dr. Richard Ferkel is a top orthopedic surgeon at the Southern Orthopedic Institute and an assistant clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at UCLA. He has operated on over a dozen Achilles tears of NBA players, including those of Klay Thompson, DeMarcus Cousins and Rodney Hood. In February, Thompson ]

Over time, Payne added hybrid moves to shift to certain spots like they were sweating through a game of Twister. If the goal is to get to 12 o’clock, Payne would shout a combo move — say, 10 o’clock to two o’clock — in order to juke the imaginary defender enough to eventually plant both feet, both hands in a 12 o’clock spot.

“If you’re looking at the face of a clock,” Payne said, recalling those countless sessions in the gym, “we wanted to make sure we could create space going to every single number on the clock.”

The key, he said, is that Curry’s trainers would load the movement with resistance bands and heavy lifting in order to properly strengthen Curry’s muscles to execute the new motion patterns. He had to prepare his body to perform.

And so Curry decided to implement the stepback and side step. No longer are players training to do set shots and pull-up jumpers in front of them. To combat the growing size and athleticism of defenders, scorers like Curry are forced to go in reverse and sideways in ways never thought possible.

To illustrate the evolution, consider that in 2013-14 Curry led the league with 69 stepback 3s, per Kirk Goldsberry’s tracking. Two MVP awards and three NBA championships later, the league started catching on to Curry’s innovative moves. By 2018-19, the league leader in stepbacks, Houston’s James Harden, registered 613, a tenfold increase in just five years.

Were we thinking at the time, well, the NBA is going to have a lot of calf and Achilles issues? No, we were not thinking that at the time.Brandon Payne, longtime trainer

Stephen Curry spawned a league full of people trying to be Stephen Curry — no matter if they’re 6-foot-2 like Curry or 7-5 like Victor Wembanyama, who averages over six 3-point attempts per game in his NBA career — many of which are hitting different numbers on the clock. Everyone wants to be Steph, but a separate question is whether their bodies are equipped to handle it.

Dončić, Haliburton, Lillard and Tatum are some of the most innovative creators when it comes to getting to their 3-point shot and using counters to attack the threat of the deep ball. The longer 3-pointers also mean longer runways, which require stronger brake systems to decelerate and finish at the rim after going downhill. And they all use “false steps” to accelerate forward with a push-off on a back foot and take advantage of hard closeouts on their 3-point shots. Is it a coincidence that they’re beset by calf and Achilles issues?

Looking back, Payne didn’t consider the long-term implications of the clock drill. But like many others around the league, he wonders about how the game has changed, the role of the 3-point shot and whether it’s a factor in what we’re seeing.

“Now, were we thinking at the time, well, the NBA is going to have a lot of calf and Achilles issues? No, we were not thinking that at the time,” Payne said.

The race to solve the issue isn’t just a medical one. It’s being waged in Silicon Valley.

The search for answers

Brett Burman thought there had to be a better way. After working for over a dozen years in coaching and front-office roles in college, the NBA and overseas leading the London Lions to the 2023 EuroCup Final Four as the team’s general manager, Burman understands why so many teams are terrified of non-contact injuries.

He left London in 2023 with a basketball executive’s version of what he calls “PTSD.” After signing three former NBA players to key roles, he watched them go down with major non-contact injuries. Sam Dekker, Tarik Phillip and Kosta Koufos all suffered key injuries that ruined the team’s chances of reaching its potential.

He remembers going into a hallway and FaceTiming the team doc about whether to let Dekker back into the game or keep him out. In a matter of seconds, they had to make the call.

“And we made the wrong one,” Burman says. “I had the players’ health — he was tough as s*** — and the weight of the whole organization on my shoulders. I didn’t have the data, the science, and we made the wrong decision.”

Following that experience in London and all his years in front offices, Burman linked up with Adam Petway, the former director of performance of the Washington Wizards, and founded a new company called OnSport AI that tries to revolutionize injury prevention in pro sports. One NBA team has signed on as they pilot their software, and they are in talks with several other teams for their services.

OnSport AI uses computer vision and machine learning fused with tracking data to identify injury risk in real-time during competition. The company’s software tracks coordinates for joints — think hips, ankles, shoulders, elbows, etc — for all 10 players on the court and compares it to each players’ historical record going back years, thanks to TV broadcasts.

How did that player jump? Off one foot or two? How did he move laterally? How did he land? Are his hips level or favoring one side? In laymen’s terms, OnSport AI seeks to detect if something in a player’s biomechanics is “off” and alerts the user when risk of injury reaches certain thresholds.

Picture, for instance, instead of a stamina meter above a player in video games, the screen shows a color-coded injury-risk meter that quantifies a player’s likelihood of suffering a non-contact injury based on a proprietary system.

Burman’s company and other tech outfits are racing to solve the problem. On Tuesday, leading data provider Sportradar and bio-analytics company Orreco announced a new player health and data-tracking partnership that promises to “maximize availability” and track workloads in a similar manner as OnSport AI. In January, the NBA announced it was launching a new biomechanics program to try to reduce injuries in light of the uptick in player absences. Four companies were selected to collaborate with the NBA in consultation with P3, a leading sports science lab in Santa Barbara led by Dr. Marcus Elliott.

Henry Abbott’s new book, “Ballistic,” which profiles Elliott and his leading work in injury-prevention science, could be described as a 300-page ode to our hips. So much of the ailments in the NBA athlete can be traced back to irregularities in the hip and how it absorbs and facilitates the ever-expanding, thunderous forces in the game.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to learn, then, that Curry worships at the altar of hips. In 2015, the Warriors’ then-director of athletic performance, Keke Lyles, told me Curry, the smallest guy on the team, was second strongest on the team in the deadlift category, regularly lifting 400 pounds. To improve flexion and mobility, he obsessed over exercises like the single-leg hip airplane yoga move.

Strengthening his hips was the key to saving his ankles, which had hampered him early in his NBA career. (So did Ferkel’s surgical procedures.) Notably, Curry, who has weaponized the 3-ball more than anyone, has not been listed with a calf strain or Achilles injury in his 17-year career.

One of the key indicators for OnSport AI’s technology focuses on the coordinates of the ball-and-socket joint, the hip. The exact patterns they flag in hips and other body parts are tightly guarded; Petway and Burman call it their secret sauce, honed through thousands of hours in NBA circles and poring through the literature. The false step, it turns out, is a central character in Petway’s published research on Achilles tears, but identifying the underlying cause of Achilles ruptures is more nuanced. The false step — the action that befell Haliburton, Lillard and Tatum — could be better described as the straw that broke the camel’s back, but not necessarily deserving of the most blame.

Putting aside the medical concerns, good luck getting rid of the false step in basketball. Convincing elite hoopers to change their instinctual movement patterns is a daunting task. Perhaps even more challenging is getting sign-off from the National Basketball Players Association to track real-time injury risk using fancy algorithms with team staffers at the controls.

In June, Adam Silver said on ESPN the league was using artificial intelligence to get to the bottom of it and formed panels to address it. The addition of cutting-edge technology and the formulation of committees could dramatically improve the issue of calf strains and Achilles tears. It could also be years before conclusions can be drawn, and even longer to be implemented at scale. Time is of the essence. Within six months of the NBA launching the biomechanics tech initiative in January, the world watched as three of the biggest names in the sport — Tatum, Lillard and Haliburton — went down with Achilles tears.

But one subtraction could help — and fast.

Is reducing the schedule the solution?

The looming variable over all of these lower leg injuries is, of course, the 82-game schedule that has been in place for nearly 60 years.

It’s a contentious issue that requires all stakeholders — owners, players and TV partners — to come together and reevaluate the entire system. With the 3-point arc stretching the dimensions of the game further and further out, the game is much more demanding. Steve Kerr raised concerns to Yahoo Sports this past May in the wake of so many high-profile injuries.

Dr. Ferkel saw Kerr’s quotes and made note of his remarks in our discussion about the current issues. When I asked Ferkel if he thought the league should reduce the number of games in the schedule to increase the number of recovery days, he said it’s something that comes up frequently.

“We’ve discussed this at length, regarding limiting the number of games in the schedule, especially back-to-backs,” Ferkel said. “The league is looking at this carefully and they’re trying to find data to explain if there is a relationship between back-to-backs and injuries.”

What is his view?

“I feel there may be a relationship, but we need more science to know for sure,” Ferkel said.

Over at HSS, Ellis shares the sentiment that reducing the number of games could be a solution, if the economics can be worked out. He points out the economics might not be working for fans now.

“It’s a huge number of games that they’re playing, day in and day out, some back-to-back,” Ellis said. “We’ve seen coaches resting their players and then the league gets on them because people are paying tickets to watch these players. Something has to give.”

Too often recently, everyone agrees, that something is the Achilles tendon.

Ellis comes back to Curry and how the game is being played now. The speed of the games. The speed of the schedule. Tatum, Lillard and Haliburton were three of the top 3-point shooters in the game, all suffering Achilles tears in big moments. Can we really eradicate the 3-point shot and how they get to those shots?

“I wouldn’t say a stepback by itself is like a major trauma,” Ellis said. “But maybe they’re doing it over and over and just … it’s stretching the limits.”

Tyrese Haliburton tried to heal his right calf strain in time for the biggest game of his life, Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals.

Multiple hyperbaric chamber sessions per day. H-Wave electrical stimulation. Treatment around the clock. All that seemed to work. The opening minutes of Game 7 became The Tyrese Haliburton Show. The two-time All-Star sank three straight 3-pointers to pull the Pacers ahead 14-10. To the undiscerning eye, his calf seemed just fine.

And then, the show ended.

At the five-minute mark of the first quarter, the largest tendon in Haliburton’s body snapped as he pushed off his right heel to accelerate forward. His worst fears were realized: an Achilles tear proximate to the same damaged right calf. He pounded the hardwood in disbelief. With Haliburton sidelined, the Thunder pulled away late and won by 12.

Hunched on crutches in the hallway after the game, Haliburton greeted his teammates and was met with hugs and tears. Little did we know, his injury didn’t just disrupt the 2025 NBA Finals; it also disrupted the entire NBA landscape. Like an earthquake that sends shockwaves for months, Haliburton’s torn Achilles that was preceded by a calf strain — on top of the Achilles tears of Damian Lillard and Jayson Tatum in the injury-marred 2025 postseason — fundamentally changed the way teams are operating this season. And not just the Pacers, who have fallen to 6-18 without their star.

Ja Morant. Victor Wembanyama. Giannis Antetokounmpo. All suffered calf strains in the opening weeks of the season. All sidelined for multiple weeks. They are the biggest names, but there are more. A lot more. In the first 20 games of the 2025-26 season, we’ve seen a substantial increase in calf injuries (excluding contusions caused by blunt force), according to leading injury expert Jeff Stotts of InStreetClothes.com. This time last season, there were 18 calf injuries at the 20-game mark. This season, it’s up to 25 incidents, representing an increase of nearly 40%.

More significant, however, is the elongated recovery timeline of these injuries. Per Stotts’ data, the number of games lost due to calf injuries, through 20 games played, skyrocketed from 36 to 108. A tripling of last season’s total.

Luka Dončić was traded, in part, because of his recurring calf strains in Dallas. Antetokounmpo may be the next example, as the NBA world tries to decipher how his recent history of calf strains will affect his future. No one wants to have another Haliburton situation — most of all, the players.

Something has changed. But pinpointing exactly what is a mystery that has perplexed NBA teams, fans and the medical community.

Based on the injury data and conversations throughout the league with Yahoo Sports, these have become the two scariest words in basketball:

Calf strain.

‘The NBA is very concerned’

Dr. Richard Ferkel is a top orthopedic surgeon at the Southern Orthopedic Institute and an assistant clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at UCLA. He has operated on over a dozen Achilles tears of NBA players, including those of Klay Thompson, DeMarcus Cousins and Rodney Hood. In February, Thompson ]

Over time, Payne added hybrid moves to shift to certain spots like they were sweating through a game of Twister. If the goal is to get to 12 o’clock, Payne would shout a combo move — say, 10 o’clock to two o’clock — in order to juke the imaginary defender enough to eventually plant both feet, both hands in a 12 o’clock spot.

“If you’re looking at the face of a clock,” Payne said, recalling those countless sessions in the gym, “we wanted to make sure we could create space going to every single number on the clock.”

The key, he said, is that Curry’s trainers would load the movement with resistance bands and heavy lifting in order to properly strengthen Curry’s muscles to execute the new motion patterns. He had to prepare his body to perform.

And so Curry decided to implement the stepback and side step. No longer are players training to do set shots and pull-up jumpers in front of them. To combat the growing size and athleticism of defenders, scorers like Curry are forced to go in reverse and sideways in ways never thought possible.

To illustrate the evolution, consider that in 2013-14 Curry led the league with 69 stepback 3s, per Kirk Goldsberry’s tracking. Two MVP awards and three NBA championships later, the league started catching on to Curry’s innovative moves. By 2018-19, the league leader in stepbacks, Houston’s James Harden, registered 613, a tenfold increase in just five years.

Were we thinking at the time, well, the NBA is going to have a lot of calf and Achilles issues? No, we were not thinking that at the time.Brandon Payne, longtime trainer

Stephen Curry spawned a league full of people trying to be Stephen Curry — no matter if they’re 6-foot-2 like Curry or 7-5 like Victor Wembanyama, who averages over six 3-point attempts per game in his NBA career — many of which are hitting different numbers on the clock. Everyone wants to be Steph, but a separate question is whether their bodies are equipped to handle it.

Dončić, Haliburton, Lillard and Tatum are some of the most innovative creators when it comes to getting to their 3-point shot and using counters to attack the threat of the deep ball. The longer 3-pointers also mean longer runways, which require stronger brake systems to decelerate and finish at the rim after going downhill. And they all use “false steps” to accelerate forward with a push-off on a back foot and take advantage of hard closeouts on their 3-point shots. Is it a coincidence that they’re beset by calf and Achilles issues?

Looking back, Payne didn’t consider the long-term implications of the clock drill. But like many others around the league, he wonders about how the game has changed, the role of the 3-point shot and whether it’s a factor in what we’re seeing.

“Now, were we thinking at the time, well, the NBA is going to have a lot of calf and Achilles issues? No, we were not thinking that at the time,” Payne said.

The race to solve the issue isn’t just a medical one. It’s being waged in Silicon Valley.

The search for answers

Brett Burman thought there had to be a better way. After working for over a dozen years in coaching and front-office roles in college, the NBA and overseas leading the London Lions to the 2023 EuroCup Final Four as the team’s general manager, Burman understands why so many teams are terrified of non-contact injuries.

He left London in 2023 with a basketball executive’s version of what he calls “PTSD.” After signing three former NBA players to key roles, he watched them go down with major non-contact injuries. Sam Dekker, Tarik Phillip and Kosta Koufos all suffered key injuries that ruined the team’s chances of reaching its potential.

He remembers going into a hallway and FaceTiming the team doc about whether to let Dekker back into the game or keep him out. In a matter of seconds, they had to make the call.

“And we made the wrong one,” Burman says. “I had the players’ health — he was tough as s*** — and the weight of the whole organization on my shoulders. I didn’t have the data, the science, and we made the wrong decision.”

Following that experience in London and all his years in front offices, Burman linked up with Adam Petway, the former director of performance of the Washington Wizards, and founded a new company called OnSport AI that tries to revolutionize injury prevention in pro sports. One NBA team has signed on as they pilot their software, and they are in talks with several other teams for their services.

OnSport AI uses computer vision and machine learning fused with tracking data to identify injury risk in real-time during competition. The company’s software tracks coordinates for joints — think hips, ankles, shoulders, elbows, etc — for all 10 players on the court and compares it to each players’ historical record going back years, thanks to TV broadcasts.

How did that player jump? Off one foot or two? How did he move laterally? How did he land? Are his hips level or favoring one side? In laymen’s terms, OnSport AI seeks to detect if something in a player’s biomechanics is “off” and alerts the user when risk of injury reaches certain thresholds.

Picture, for instance, instead of a stamina meter above a player in video games, the screen shows a color-coded injury-risk meter that quantifies a player’s likelihood of suffering a non-contact injury based on a proprietary system.

Burman’s company and other tech outfits are racing to solve the problem. On Tuesday, leading data provider Sportradar and bio-analytics company Orreco announced a new player health and data-tracking partnership that promises to “maximize availability” and track workloads in a similar manner as OnSport AI. In January, the NBA announced it was launching a new biomechanics program to try to reduce injuries in light of the uptick in player absences. Four companies were selected to collaborate with the NBA in consultation with P3, a leading sports science lab in Santa Barbara led by Dr. Marcus Elliott.

Henry Abbott’s new book, “Ballistic,” which profiles Elliott and his leading work in injury-prevention science, could be described as a 300-page ode to our hips. So much of the ailments in the NBA athlete can be traced back to irregularities in the hip and how it absorbs and facilitates the ever-expanding, thunderous forces in the game.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to learn, then, that Curry worships at the altar of hips. In 2015, the Warriors’ then-director of athletic performance, Keke Lyles, told me Curry, the smallest guy on the team, was second strongest on the team in the deadlift category, regularly lifting 400 pounds. To improve flexion and mobility, he obsessed over exercises like the single-leg hip airplane yoga move.

Strengthening his hips was the key to saving his ankles, which had hampered him early in his NBA career. (So did Ferkel’s surgical procedures.) Notably, Curry, who has weaponized the 3-ball more than anyone, has not been listed with a calf strain or Achilles injury in his 17-year career.

One of the key indicators for OnSport AI’s technology focuses on the coordinates of the ball-and-socket joint, the hip. The exact patterns they flag in hips and other body parts are tightly guarded; Petway and Burman call it their secret sauce, honed through thousands of hours in NBA circles and poring through the literature. The false step, it turns out, is a central character in Petway’s published research on Achilles tears, but identifying the underlying cause of Achilles ruptures is more nuanced. The false step — the action that befell Haliburton, Lillard and Tatum — could be better described as the straw that broke the camel’s back, but not necessarily deserving of the most blame.

Putting aside the medical concerns, good luck getting rid of the false step in basketball. Convincing elite hoopers to change their instinctual movement patterns is a daunting task. Perhaps even more challenging is getting sign-off from the National Basketball Players Association to track real-time injury risk using fancy algorithms with team staffers at the controls.

In June, Adam Silver said on ESPN the league was using artificial intelligence to get to the bottom of it and formed panels to address it. The addition of cutting-edge technology and the formulation of committees could dramatically improve the issue of calf strains and Achilles tears. It could also be years before conclusions can be drawn, and even longer to be implemented at scale. Time is of the essence. Within six months of the NBA launching the biomechanics tech initiative in January, the world watched as three of the biggest names in the sport — Tatum, Lillard and Haliburton — went down with Achilles tears.

But one subtraction could help — and fast.

Is reducing the schedule the solution?

The looming variable over all of these lower leg injuries is, of course, the 82-game schedule that has been in place for nearly 60 years.

It’s a contentious issue that requires all stakeholders — owners, players and TV partners — to come together and reevaluate the entire system. With the 3-point arc stretching the dimensions of the game further and further out, the game is much more demanding. Steve Kerr raised concerns to Yahoo Sports this past May in the wake of so many high-profile injuries.

Dr. Ferkel saw Kerr’s quotes and made note of his remarks in our discussion about the current issues. When I asked Ferkel if he thought the league should reduce the number of games in the schedule to increase the number of recovery days, he said it’s something that comes up frequently.

“We’ve discussed this at length, regarding limiting the number of games in the schedule, especially back-to-backs,” Ferkel said. “The league is looking at this carefully and they’re trying to find data to explain if there is a relationship between back-to-backs and injuries.”

What is his view?

“I feel there may be a relationship, but we need more science to know for sure,” Ferkel said.

Over at HSS, Ellis shares the sentiment that reducing the number of games could be a solution, if the economics can be worked out. He points out the economics might not be working for fans now.

“It’s a huge number of games that they’re playing, day in and day out, some back-to-back,” Ellis said. “We’ve seen coaches resting their players and then the league gets on them because people are paying tickets to watch these players. Something has to give.”

Too often recently, everyone agrees, that something is the Achilles tendon.

Ellis comes back to Curry and how the game is being played now. The speed of the games. The speed of the schedule. Tatum, Lillard and Haliburton were three of the top 3-point shooters in the game, all suffering Achilles tears in big moments. Can we really eradicate the 3-point shot and how they get to those shots?

“I wouldn’t say a stepback by itself is like a major trauma,” Ellis said. “But maybe they’re doing it over and over and just … it’s stretching the limits.”