Injury prevention in the NBA is an oxymoron. That’s the problem with injuries: They can’t be prevented because they can’t be predicted. But what if they could?

That’s the premise of a new research paper being presented at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference this week. The study attempts to predict NBA injuries in order to prevent them—and it claims that resting the 20% of players above a certain risk threshold could avert 60% of injuries.

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