Ben Simmons tore his right Achilles tendon in a Kings practice on October 19th, the day before a season opener he’d spent the whole offseason building toward, and “cursed” is already the wrong word for what happened next.
Simmons signed a one-year, $3.5 million “prove it” deal with the Sacramento Kings this fall, the kind of contract that only makes sense if the body cooperates. It didn’t. He never got to his first season back in Sacramento, let alone the opener against the Clippers he was supposed to debut in, and a torn Achilles means he’s done for the year before he played a minute of it.
That would be a sad story about one guy. It became something else six days later, when the Oklahoma City Thunder lost two rotation players in the same game against the Clippers. Jalen Williams fractured his left fibula and dislocated his ankle driving to the rim with 1:14 left, and on the same night, Cason Wallace tore his labrum and is heading into shoulder surgery a week after signing a five-year, $139 million extension. The Thunder now have two building blocks in street clothes, with no firm timeline for either.
Call it cursed if you want. NBA Twitter already has.
https://twitter.com/LegionHoops/status/2115498475957936200
Two days before that game, Paolo Banchero rolled his ankle against Minnesota — a grade-1 sprain, four to six weeks, no surgery — four days after a 35-point, 10-assist season opener for the Orlando Magic. The same Friday night Williams and Wallace went down, Jalen Duren strained his hamstring driving to the rim against Miami and is out at least two weeks.
Five players, one bad week. Three of them need surgery. None of them did anything unusual to get hurt: a practice rep, a drive to the rim, a routine roll of the ankle. That’s the detail the curse theory conveniently skips.
“Bad luck” is the explanation that costs nothing. It doesn’t ask the league why its preseason compresses contact work into three weeks. It doesn’t ask teams why rotation players are running live reps in October at the same intensity as March. It doesn’t ask anyone to change anything, because nobody chose this. The calendar did.
I run the Chicago lakefront most mornings, and if I rolled the same ankle five different times in a week, I’d stop blaming the pavement.
This is a volume problem, not a curse, and volume problems have causes you can actually name: scheduling, workload, a preseason that asks bodies to go from zero to game speed in under a month. Duren’s Detroit Pistons will tell you the same thing the Orlando Magic will.
The rest of the league’s injury news will keep stacking up while this gets sorted out, every ankle and ligament filed under the same convenient word.
Curses don’t need surgery. These guys do.
