"Entering these Finals, rotation players (top seven players per team in minutes per game) have missed 61 playoff games in 2016. That's the highest total in the past two decades and three times the rate from 1996 to 1999. In the past five postseasons, 217 games were lost to injury -- a whopping 105 games more than the total in the previous five postseasons, from 2007 to 2011 (112). [..] From 1983 to 2000, top seeds faced each other 10 times out of 18, or about every other year. Not so anymore: In the past 16 postseasons, a No. 1 versus No. 1 has happened only twice, this season and in 2008. [..] the current high rate of injuries to the hardest working players is no accident. And the league knows it. [..] The Warriors trekked a league-high 54,000 miles in just 169 days this regular season. That is nearly double the average MLB team's mileage during a 162-game slate that spans 180 days. [..] today's players spend years playing AAU basketball, some as early as at 8 years old. They play all those games per day during the summer, plus in-season competition, plus many of those players play only one sport, rather than several. [..] They discuss travel across time zones and its effects, as well as the growing body of research that shows exhaustion and injuries go together like peanut butter and jelly. [..] LeBron James doesn't think minutes are the issue; the issue is the number of games. "We all, as players, think it's too many games," James said."
