The schedule hurts more players than the collisions ever do

Travel, time zones and compressed weeks do damage that shows up as a soft-tissue injury with no visible cause.

A player pulls up in the third quarter with nobody near him. The replay shows nothing, because there is nothing to show. That injury was made three days earlier in an airport.

Soft tissue injuries are a fatigue story and fatigue in this sport is mostly a scheduling story. Not the total number of games, which gets all the attention, but the distribution. Four games in six nights with two time zone crossings is a different physiological load from four games in eight nights at home, and the box score records them identically. Sleep is the mechanism people underrate. A team landing at three in the morning and shooting at eleven has lost a recovery window that no amount of ice baths replaces, and muscle repair is the thing that window was for.

This is why the sport's medical staffs care about flight direction and arrival time in a way that sounds superstitious until you look at the circadian argument. Travelling east compresses the day and shortens the sleep opportunity. Travelling west is easier. Any front office that has looked at its own soft-tissue log by trip type has seen the pattern and has almost certainly not published it.

The obvious response is to rest players, and that has become the standard answer, but I think it treats a symptom while leaving the cause completely intact. Resting a star on the second night of a back-to-back protects that star and does nothing for the eight other players who fly the same route and play the same minutes. It also transfers the cost onto whoever bought a ticket to the game he sat out, which is a genuine grievance and the reason the sport keeps legislating around it.

The cause is a calendar built to sell inventory. Compressing eighty-odd games into six months exists because the postseason has to end before the summer, and both ends of that constraint are commercial rather than sporting.

Shorten the regular season by ten games and the soft-tissue problem improves immediately and quietly, and everybody involved knows it. Nobody proposes it seriously, because ten games is a large number with a currency symbol in front of it, and a hamstring only costs somebody else.