Dwyane Wade: Injury Prone?
At heart, I am a pessimist. I know this when I watch Dwyane Wade play. When most people see the Miami Heat's dynamic young guard, an All-NBA Second Team pick in just his second season out of Marquette University, they see one of the league's most exciting players. I see Penny Hardaway and Grant Hill.
Like Wade, Hardaway and Hill were once the toast of the NBA as young players before injuries robbed them of their explosiveness. Hill remains one of the league's better players when his chronic ankle problems have subsided enough to allow him to play, but he is no longer a superstar. Hardaway's knees have reduced him to one of the league's most highly-paid reserves.
As NBA fans, we generally tend to assume that players will develop in a predictable fashion. But while, on the whole, players improve dramatically in their first couple of seasons, peak around age 27 and gradually level off before falling off a cliff in their mid to late 30s, individual players exhibit all sorts of unpredictable development patterns. Amongst others, Willie Anderson (best season came as a rookie), Bruce Bowen (not an NBA regular until age 26, but still as good as he ever has been at age 33 last season) and Karl Malone and John Stockton (productive into their 40s) can attest to this fact.
While many of these developments are random, there are predictable trends in addition to the obvious aging pattern. Players who are productive regulars at a young age are usually derailed only by injuries, while youngsters who commit a lot of turnovers in an effort to do good things usually end up developing better than their more conservative counterparts.
Injuries remain something of a mystery to NBA analysts; there is no equivalent of baseball "medhead" Will Carroll. If there were such a person, however, my cynical side wonders if he wouldn't worry about Wade. Not only did the Heat star miss 21 games due to injury as a rookie, few guards take more punishment. Thanks to his lightning quickness, Wade attempted 762 free throws last year, the fourth-highest total in the league. The Flash mostly managed to avoid harm until the Eastern Conference Finals, when a strained rib muscle sidelined him for Game 6 and hampered him in Game 7 as the Heat was eliminated by the Detroit Pistons a game short of the NBA Finals.
To try to establish whether Wade's style will have any impact on his chances of injury long term, I decided to first look for similar players by identifying the leaders in free-throws attempted per game in a season by players 6-4 and under (Wade is 6-4) and in their first three seasons. I subsequently limited the study to players since 1967-68, ostensibly because the game changed but in truth because having seasons less than 82 games was too cumbersome.
The leaderboard:
Player FTA/G Year
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Nate Archibald 10.8 71-72
Allen Iverson 9.9 98-99
DWYANE WADE 9.9 04-05
David Thompson 8.4 77-78
Kevin Johnson 8.1 89-90
Stu Lantz 7.9 70-71
Earl Monroe 7.8 69-70
Steve Francis 7.4 01-02
World B. Free 7.4 77-78
Geoff Petrie 7.3 70-71
Sidney Moncrief 7.2 81-82 The list confirms that Wade is indeed special in his ability to get to the free-throw line (and in the amount of punishment he takes in the paint). So to what extent were these other players affected by injuries? To answer this question, I looked at their games played over their first 10 seasons in the NBA (1998-99 totals pro-rated to 82 games). Zero indicates that the player was unable to play due to injury, while a blank space means they'd left the league for other reasons (or, in the case of Iverson and Francis, have yet to reach 10 seasons); these seasons were not used in the computation of averages. For the latter group of players, their totals are pro-rated to 10 seasons. I also include the summary statistics "full seasons" (in which the player missed five games or fewer) and "injury-shortened seasons" (in which the player played 50 games or fewer):
Player Y1 Y2 Y3 Y4 Y5 Y6 Y7 Y8 Y9 Y10 TOT FULL INJ
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Nate Archibald 82 76 80 35 82 78 34 69 80 80 696 6 2
Allen Iverson 76 80 79 70 71 60 82 48 75 712 3 1
David Thompson 82 80 76 39 77 61 75 19 0 0 509 3 4
Kevin Johnson 80 81 74 77 78 49 67 47 56 70 679 4 2
Stu Lantz 73 82 82 81 51 50 75 53 684 3 0
Earl Monroe 82 80 82 81 63 75 41 78 76 77 735 6 1
Steve Francis 77 80 57 81 79 78 753 5 0
World B. Free 71 78 76 78 68 65 78 73 75 71 733 3 0
Geoff Petrie 82 60 79 73 80 72 0 0 0 0 446 3 4
Sidney Moncrief 77 80 80 76 79 73 73 39 56 62 695 4 1
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Averages/Totals 78 78 77 69 73 66 58 47 52 51 664 40 15 Those are some interesting results. On their own however, they don't really tell us much. We have to have some comparison data. To produce that, I decided to create a control group. In the same season, I looked for players 6-4 and under who played similar minutes totals (to control for ability) and had lower free throw per game averages.
Player FTA/G Year
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JoJo White 4.3 71-72
Stephon Marbury 5.7 98-99
Ricky Sobers 5.1 77-78
Mitch Richmond 6.0 89-90
Norm Van Lier 5.4 70-71
Clem Haskins 5.2 69-70
Baron Davis 4.1 01-02
Quinn Buckner 2.5 77-78
Ron Williams 4.8 70-71
Kyle Macy 2.1 81-82 I should stop to point out a couple of problems here. The first is that, while I attempted to match quality as closely as possible, the players on the second list are likely worse than the players on the first list on average. In general, players who get to the free-throw line more often are likely to be better. The other is that the differences in getting to the line aren't always huge; Mitch Richmond, for one, wasn't far from the previous top ten list. (Richmond is also listed at 6-5 by most sources, but I have in my database at 6-4.) Still, here are the summary statistics for the control group:
Player Y1 Y2 Y3 Y4 Y5 Y6 Y7 Y8 Y9 Y10 TOT FULL INJ
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JoJo White 60 75 79 82 82 82 82 82 46 76 746 6 1
Stephon Marbury 67 82 81 74 67 82 81 81 82 775 6 0
Ricky Sobers 78 79 79 81 82 71 80 41 81 71 743 7 1
Mitch Richmond 79 78 77 80 45 78 82 81 81 70 751 8 1
Norm Van Lier 81 82 79 80 80 70 76 82 78 38 746 7 1
Clem Haskins 76 79 82 82 79 77 81 70 55 0 681 6 1
Baron Davis 82 82 82 50 67 46 682 3 1
Quinn Buckner 79 82 81 67 82 70 72 79 75 32 719 5 1
Ron Williams 75 80 82 80 73 71 46 9 645 3 2
Kyle Macy 82 82 82 82 65 82 76 787 5 0
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Averages/Totals 76 80 80 76 72 73 75 66 71 48 728 56 9 On average, the low free throw group played 63 more games than the high free throw group over their first 10 NBA seasons. They were more durable, with 56 "full" seasons to 40 for the high free throw group and only nine seasons lost to injury as compared to 15. Many of the perimeter players were extremely durable; Richmond only had two seasons where he failed to play in at least 77 games, while Kyle Macy was an iron man (playing all 82 games) five times in his seven NBA seasons, while JoJo White did five straight seasons.
What I find particularly interesting is a season-by-season comparison of the two groups:
Group Y1 Y2 Y3 Y4 Y5 Y6 Y7 Y8 Y9 Y10
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High FT 78 78 77 69 73 66 58 47 52 51
Low FT 76 80 80 76 72 73 75 66 71 48
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Diff +2 -2 -3 -7 +1 -7 -17 -19 -19 +3 Naturally, as players age, they miss more games because of injuries. While this progression was rather gradual for the low free throw group, however, it was rather rapid for the high free throw group. As young players, they played similar numbers of games before the low free throw players became increasingly more durable (before dropping off in Year 10, presumably a fluke but still perhaps an ominous sign for Stephon Marbury, who is entering his 10th season).
So what does this all mean for Wade? With such a small sample, it's not fair to draw powerful conclusions, but it does appear that his constant penetration puts him at increased injury risk going forward. I don't know that I would say it changes his chances of a major, Hardaway- or Hill-style injury; I suspect those are fairly random. An Allen Iverson or a Kevin Johnson might be a better guide. While Iverson has only missed a great deal of time once in his career, he's regularly bothered by nagging injuries and has only played more than 75 games once in the last six years. Johnson never played more than 80 games after his first two seasons.
There's no need to be a pessimist like me and see injured man walking. At the same time, it's worth remembering that while Wade is in his healthy prime, we should enjoy this opportunity to watch him play without taking him for granted.
Anyway, I didn't have much time to do a whole lot on my own on this topic. I don't completely agree with the analysis for a variety of reasons, but I thought that it was definitely an interesting perspective.
posted by arun at 7:47 PM
1 Comments:
I hope Wade doesn't get hurt.
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