Other teams can tell similar, if less dramatic, stories. Jayson Tatum, of the defending-champion Boston Celtics, tore his Achilles in the final minutes of an intense playoff game against the New York Knicks last season, ruining his team’s hopes of a repeat. There’s a small chance that he’ll return this spring, but in the off-season the Celtics blew up its core of expensive veteran players anyway, acknowledging that their hopes of winning this season were wrecked. The Houston Rockets made a splashy trade for Kevin Durant in July, hoping to contend for a championship this go-around, before their starting point guard, Fred VanVleet, went down with a torn A.C.L. in September. LeBron James did not play in the Los Angeles Lakers’ opening game while suffering from sciatica, his first time missing the start of the season in twenty-three years, and was off the court until mid-November. The Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo rampaged through the first few weeks before injuring his groin. The San Antonio Spurs’ miraculously long and skilled young Frenchman, Victor Wembanyama, who electrified the league at the start of the season, is now missing time with a calf strain. Several other star players, including Anthony Davis and Ja Morant, have also been out with strained calves. On Wednesday, the Golden State Warriors’ Stephen Curry hobbled to the locker room after a series of collisions and is expected to miss at least a week with a bruised quad. And so on.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter