The NBA is in the midst of a leg plague, and a growing number of players are missing a growing number of games with lower-body soft-tissue injuries.
Why are they occurring so often? And what, if anything, can be done about them?
It’s impossible to watch the San Antonio Spurs in these playoffs without sensing the shadow version of the team burbling just beneath the surface. Sometimes it comes out when Victor Wembanyama’s reach exceeds his grasp, baffling as that concept might seem. Yet just as often, it seeps through in the gradual realization that San Antonio’s second-best player might be playing only half the game. Dylan Harper is becoming undeniable. Yes, he’s a rookie. Sure, he’s coming off the bench. But he regularly takes over playoff games that feature Wemby and Anthony Edwards and several other All-Stars besides, and he makes it look easy in a way that—for Minnesota and every other team in the league—should sound the loudest possible alarm.
Harper is San Antonio’s ace in the hole. The young Spurs are one win away from the Western Conference finals, and they’ve achieved that much without ever fully unleashing the no. 2 pick to anything close to his creative limit. And Harper is insanely talented—good in a blow-up-your-group-chat kind of way, obvious to anyone with eyes to see or even just ears to hear the awestruck shouting of those who do. He’s averaging 15 points, six rebounds, and three assists in this series like it’s nothing, and made at least half his shots in every game of this series but one. Even Harper’s defense has been calmly precocious—a 20-year-old guard in his very first playoff run, matter-of-factly going toe to toe with one of the most explosive scorers in the world.
Read Rob Mahoney’s story about Harper’s emergence and what it means for the Spurs on The Ringer.
