Kevin Durant. Yes Morant. Zion Williamson. Chet Holmgren. Tyrese Maxey. Paolo Banchero. Kristaps Porzingis. Aaron Gordon. Kawhi Leonard. Chris Middleton. Isaiah Hartenstein. Goodbye Murray.

The list is only the tip of the iceberg. Some of the NBA’s biggest stars have missed time already this season due to injuries — and that doesn’t even include someone like Joel Embiid, who has yet to play this season but is expected to return Tuesday.

what’s going on It felt like a rash of injuries overwhelmed the start of the NBA season. Are things really that bad?

Not. And yes.

Jeff Stotts of In Street Clothes — who maintains a database that has tracked NBA injuries for more than a decade — wrote this week that there are no more injuries so far this season compared to a year ago, but players are missing more time.

While injury rates remain on par with past seasons, the total number of games lost due to these injuries is proving more costly. Through nearly three weeks, the total number of men’s games missed due to injury or illness surpassed previous seasons by 100 games. The numbers will likely increase after the top two picks in the 2019 NBA Draft, New Orleans’ Zion Williamson and Memphis’ Ja Morant, have been ruled out indefinitely with hamstring and hip injuries, respectively.

He also wrote that before Chet Holmgren’s hip fracture was announced, that number would only increase.

Why all these more serious injuries?

This has been a topic of speculation around the NBA. A theme that comes up is teams having shorter training camps/preseasons and not playing much or taking them very seriously. The theory goes that coaches and players are more concerned with getting healthy early in the season and have rested them, pushing themselves hard in a short preseason. The result is more injuries when players enter the regular season and suddenly start going 100 miles an hour.

In the big picture, there’s the wear and tear players put on their bodies before they hit the league – has been documented that early sports specialization was hard on the bodies of many young multi-sport athletes. Players usually specialize in a sport even before they reach high school, and with a sport like basketball the season is almost year-round with AAU, high school teams and private coaches. The result is players using the same muscle groups — and wearing out the same tendons and ligaments — with repetitive motions from a younger age. That makes players’ bodies more worn out by the time they get to the league.

Like most everything in life, there probably isn’t one answer – it’s a combination of factors. But for a league trying to raise the value of the regular season — and get teams to take it seriously and not load up players to keep them healthy for the playoffs — it’s going to be a problem. All the player participation policies in the world won’t solve the underlying problems.