27-05-2025
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
‘Ballistic' Review: Building a Competitive Edge
Today's professional basketball players are capable of athletic feats that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. Think Stephen Curry's extraordinary shooting range or Nikola Jokić's sheer mastery of the game. But there's one way in which NBA players are regressing compared to their predecessors: They're getting injured more often. In the recently completed NBA regular season, the number of games players lost to injury or illness was the highest since at least 2005 (excluding one Covid-19-ravaged season), according to basketball injury tracker Jeff Stotts.
The reasons are varied, but one is that professional basketball (as well as other pro sports) focuses less on preventing injuries than on treating them. In this way, U.S. sports mirrors much of the American healthcare system, which remains painfully reactive. Marcus Elliott, a California-based physician, has spent decades trying to get injury prevention incorporated into the playbook of elite athletics. Henry Abbott tells Dr. Elliott's captivating story in 'Ballistic: The New Science of Injury-Free Athletic Performance.'
Dr. Elliott grew up in a rural area of Northern California and had a free-range childhood, with lots of time for camping, fishing and horseback riding. While in high school he hyperextended his knee playing football, which left him laid up for 4½ months in a full-length cast. Reading a medical journal devoted to sports and exercise spurred him to want to understand injury prevention, only to discover upon arriving at college that the subject wasn't taught. He nonetheless found a like-minded professor, who nurtured his interest in prevention, and later enrolled at Harvard Medical School, though he chafed at its rigidity.
The New England Patriots, and later the Seattle Mariners, eventually hired Dr. Elliott to focus on injury prevention. But neither organization was a great fit for him, owing to hidebound attitudes among the players, trainers and broader management. His experience with the Mariners was particularly sour. When he told one of the team's oft-injured pitchers that bench-press workouts could aggravate his shoulder and elbow, the player responded (with the strength coach standing next to him), 'I don't like people who try to figure things out.' Dr. Elliott left the team convinced that 'baseball is definitely the dumbest sport.'
