Determining whether age retirement for NBA players is associated with injuries and illnesses: A retrospective study

Background: The careers of professional sport players are usually influenced by injuries and skills. The careers of all-star MBA and regular players depend on their health and how rapidly their skills diminish with age, respectively. Whether the above phenomena are considered and supported in the National Basketball Association (NBA) requires verification. Methods: We downloaded injury data from the NBA website in 2010-2018 and extracted all injury events (=9,783) involving 779 NBA players. Among these players, 705 were retired, 236 possessed all-star titles (60 injured and 170 non-injured), and 466 were regular players (408 injured and 58 non-injured) from 2010 to 2018. Both samples of retired all-star (n = 236) and regular players (n = 466) were compared to verify the effect of injury and illness on the retirement age using the bootstrapping method to estimate 95% confidence intervals in medians. We hypothesized that injuries and illnesses are associated with the retirement age of all-star players and irrelative to that of regular NBA players. Social network analysis(SNA) was performed to highlight the top three injuries with the highest degree centralities in their respective clusters. Results: We observed that the top three degree centralities include (1) sprained a left ankle, (2) sprained a right ankle, and (3) illness. The top two most injured NBA teams in 2010-2018, as obtained by the metrics for measurement, were Timberwolves (x-index = 32.86) and Hornets (x-index = 31.42). Most of the careers of NBA all-star players were affected by injuries/illnesses. The NBA careers of regular players were terminated mostly according to their skill. Conclusion: Although a number of things can be debated with regard to NBA, everyone can agree on one thing: Injuries are the worst. We confirmed that injuries and illnesses exhibit significant associations with the retirement age of all-star players and are irrelative to that of regular NBA players. Sports medicine is urgently needed to help players in preventing possible injuries while in the court in the discernable future.
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Aiheet: koripallo miespuolinen huippu-urheilu USA ikä vamma sairaus suorituskyky
Aihealueet: urheilukilpailut
Tagging: Karriereende NBA
DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-22500/v1
Julkaisussa: Research Square
Julkaistu: 2020
Julkaisutyypit: artikkeli
Kieli: englanti (kieli)
Taso: kehittynyt