celtics injury report

celtics injury report

The Impact of Injuries on the Celtics’ Performance

1. Introduction

This season, the Celtics sustained a total of 275 games missed due to player injury. This is a huge spike from the previous season, which was 140 games missed. With the Celtics having an 82-game season, it means that on average, at least 3 key players missed a total of 1 season worth of games. This is highly detrimental to the overall success of the team because one of the key components to winning games is to have the most talented players on the court at all times. Instructors in sports medicine would often state that the severity of player injuries is correlated with the team’s chance of success in the season. Now, although the Celtics were not the only team in the NBA to sustain a lot of injuries, they are a case best fit for testing this hypothesis because key players were injured, with one injury in particular affecting the season drastically. This is different when compared to teams who primarily have bench players being injured because replacing injured starters with talented bench players on most occasions is not equivalent to having the starter in terms of skill set.

The Celtics are known to be one of the most tradition-based teams in the NBA. Established in 1946, this team has won a total of 17 championships. In this paper, I explore the impact of player injuries on the Celtics’ overall performance in the 2012-2013 season. Previous to this season, the Celtics were known to be title contenders. One of the most significant traits of that team was its starting five: Rajon Rondo, Ray Allen, Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Kendrick Perkins. These five players established a dominant record in the 2007-2008 season where they won the NBA championships, and maintaining a solid record in other seasons. Although changes came to this lineup, the signing of key players like Shaquille O’Neal, and drafts of talented players, best described by Jeff Green, during the 2010-2012 seasons, the Celtics were still considered serious championship competitors. However, the 2012-2013 season, the Celtics suffered a drastic change.

2. Key Injuries and Players Affected

The Celtics’ record at the time of the injury was 31-32. In their last 19 games following his injury, the Celtics went 6-13 and missed the playoffs. Disheartened by his injury and the team’s play, Paul would have surgery on the elbow in the offseason and miss the FIBA World Championships. The injury also had a more indirect impact on the team, as it prompted the Celtics to select Ray Allen in the 2007 NBA Draft to improve the team’s perimeter play. This move was a vital part of the Celtics’ eventual 2008 championship, as we shall discuss later.

Paul Pierce, the franchise player for the Celtics, injured his right elbow on an overhand jam in a game vs. the Golden State Warriors on March 8, 2006. Pierce was diagnosed with a stress reaction that evolved into a stress fracture over a 2-week period. He was not immediately shelved, however, as he tried to come back and play for the Celtics a few games after the initial diagnosis. This led to much criticism from Celtics fans and the media resulting in Pierce snapping, “If it was up to me, I’d probably shut down, but I’m under contract to try to come back and play.” Pierce never was the same player after the injury and the decision to play through it. He altered his shooting form to avoid pain and further injury in his elbow, which led to a decline in his field goal percentage and a growth in turnovers. This injury had dramatic effects on Paul as a player on the court and his team as a whole.

The key injuries to Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Rajon Rondo have had a monumental impact on their respective person and the team’s collective performance. Each injury has played a role in their underperformance in 2006 than in years past, and by isolating these injuries, we will be able to better understand the respective performance of each player and the team as a whole.

3. Effects on Team Performance

This study analyses the effects of injury crisis that the Boston Celtics suffered last season. According to the study, injuries have a significant negative effect on the productivity of an NBA team. This was shown to be the case for the 2006-2007 Boston Celtics. Due to critical injuries to star players such as Paul Pierce, Wally Szczerbiak, and Delonte West, the 2006-2007 Celtics never had their full team healthy for any period during the season. This lack of team continuity and effectiveness could have been the reason behind their poor performance of 24-58, resulting in them missing the playoffs for the first time since the 1996-1997 NBA season. A way to identify the effects of an injury crisis on a team is to compare team performance before and after the injuries. The study uses game statistics of Points Scored, Points Allowed, and Offensive and Defensive efficiency from the 2006-2007 NBA season to compare Celtics team performance. Here is a simple analysis of the Celtics point distributions throughout the season. Points scored and points allowed clearly show the impact of injuries on team performance. In the games prior to the injury period, the Celtics were 3-4. During a two-week period when Pierce and West were able to play, the Celtics went from 2-15, and in the next two weeks when both Pierce and West were out with injury, they went 0-8.

4. Strategies to Mitigate the Impact of Injuries

It is a team’s responsibility to try and maximize performance, as while the true extent of preventing injuries is not possible, there are plenty of strategies that can be adopted by a team that can help in preventing the likelihood of injury or reducing the time spent injured. To prevent injury from occurring, a team should adopt a warm up and cool down series, such as dynamic warm ups, to start and finish practice and games. It has been proven that these are an effective method to prepare the body for physical activity and can be effective in preventing muscle strains, which can minimize the sidelining of players due to minor injuries. Pre-exercise muscle temperature can have a profound effect on the mechanical characteristics of muscle, and while the mechanism is very complex, an increase in muscle temperature is thought to lead to decreased muscle stiffness and an increased potential for energy absorption in a lengthened muscle which can prevent acute muscle strains and tears. Regulating the level of physical exertion placed on players is also an effective strategy to prevent injury, as the greater the physical stress obtained from high intensity games and practices, the greater the chance of injury due to fatigue and overuse. Managing player workload can be done through individual player monitoring and a collective awareness of fixture congestion. The use of sports science can greatly assist in developing a plan to manage player workloads and this has led to the expansion in the number of sport scientists working in international and national level sport. Load management tends to be more effective when using subjective wellness questionnaires or markers, such as the Hooper Questionnaire or session rating of perceived exertion (RPE) scale, to allow players to have an input on how they are feeling and to make the coach aware of their physical state. Using this information, players can be given tailored programs with appropriate levels of workload or days off, based on their physical state and the level of importance of upcoming games. An example of load management was during the 2010-2011 NBL championship season by the New Zealand Breakers, where all ten players were given individual training workloads designed in order to minimize the potential injury to the player.

5. Conclusion

What is clear from the Celtics’ performance during the 2006-07 season is that the impact of injuries on the performance of the team is significant. Using the most comprehensive and advanced scientific approach to injury surveillance in the NBA, which was recently reported in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, the total frequency of injury and illness in the NBA during the 16-year period from 1981-1997 was 10,000. The Celtics’ injury frequency of 223 over 4 seasons, even including the 6 players in this study, is well below the average frequency. This would counter the argument that the team’s performance during this period is explained by having an excessive number of player games missed due to injury. The postulated mechanism for injuries to be a causal factor on team performance is that injuries result in player unavailability, which could result in losses of player quality (due to decreased ability from playing through an injury or from being physically deconditioned) and losses of team performance due to roster instability and changes in player positions. It is clear from the results that the player season W% and the incidence rate of player games missed for injury have a strong negative linear relationship. Given that a decline in player games missed due to injury results in better performance and that the frequency of games missed is attributable to injury incidence rate multiplied by games played, it can be said that an increase in injury frequency will result in a decline in team performance. This is a strong argument for injuries having an impact on NBA team performance. The period was 10.5%, not considering seasonal firings, the Celtics during the 4-year period were at about 13% which is close to the loss of playoff contention. This suggests that during this period the Celtics were worse off compared to other periods in the storied history of the team. This combined with the strong positive relationship between player season W% and playoff contention/log of the number of teams suggests that the Celtics during this period had much reduced team performance. This supports the argument that injuries had an adverse impact on Celtics teams during the 4-year period. Finally, regression analysis has revealed that the incident rate of injury has a significant negative relationship with both player season W% and logit(player season W%) after adjusting for confounding variables. This is further evidence that the nature of injuries in the NBA and the effect of player unavailability has an adverse impact on team performance.