Bill Simmons thinks the shoes are doing it. On his podcast, amid a rough opening couple of weeks of the 2026-27 season, he said he feels "like there's stuff to look at with the sneakers and the fact that we have all those low-tops and we have all those injuries below the knee." "Something's fishy about all of it," he added, then landed on the reasonable part: "I'd love to read a huge study on this."
He should read the ones that already exist. They don't say what he wants them to say.
Start with his own timeline problem. The low-top era in the NBA began with the Kobe 4 in 2008, when Kobe Bryant and his Nike designer went looking for soccer-cleat mobility and ditched the high collar. That was a long time ago. If exposed ankles and lightweight builds were quietly wrecking lower legs, the injury curve should have bent sometime in the following decade. It didn't. The real spike came last season — the 2024-25 Achilles tear epidemic — not sometime in the years right after low-tops took over, and this season's wave is a different problem altogether: knees, ligaments, ankles, a hamstring, not Achilles tears. Neither pattern matches a collar-height problem that's supposedly been building for over a decade.
The injuries Simmons is reacting to this season span several different types. Anthony Edwards had arthroscopic knee surgery. Jaren Jackson Jr. tore his right MCL. Paolo Banchero sprained an ankle. Jalen Williams fractured his fibula and dislocated his ankle and needs surgery, and Simmons himself called that one a fluke. Jalen Duren pulled a hamstring. You cannot build a single sneaker theory out of a torn knee ligament, a broken leg, and a hamstring strain. Those injuries have nothing to do with each other except that they happened to NBA players in the same stretch.
The people who actually study this keep saying the same thing, and none of them mention shoes. The experts tracing the rise in Achilles ruptures point to overuse, to a style of play built on explosive stop-start movement, and to lower-leg strength lagging behind the upper leg from how modern players train. The single most dangerous motion they name is the step-back. Which is the cruel joke buried in Simmons' own words: he wonders whether "the technology is actually working against them" because guys love to Eurostep and do "all these other things." The move is the problem. The shoe just comes along for the ride.
Then there's the part that happens before any of these players sign a contract. Seven years ago an ESPN investigation called youth basketball players "ticking time bombs," the product of year-round AAU ball and single-sport specialization at ages when bodies shouldn't be grinding that hard. The research on this is as solid as anything in sports medicine. Athletes who specialize early get hurt more, and the NBA-specific work found multisport players were roughly half as likely to suffer a major injury across their careers. That's real data. The sneaker thing is a vibe off the broadcast.
Shoe companies do engineer tackier soles for grip. That's documented and intentional, and more traction in a cut means more force for your joints to eat. Fine. That's a plausible contributing factor worth a paragraph in somebody's study. It doesn't explain a Jaren Jackson MCL or a fractured fibula, and it doesn't rescue a theory whose central timeline doesn't line up.
Asking for a rigorous study beats stating a conclusion as fact, and Simmons didn't do the second thing. But if you want to point at someone for the NBA's broken lower legs, point at the youth pipeline that mangles kids by 19, and at the league and its teams that run their best players into the floor on packed schedules. The culprits have been obvious for years. They just don't have a swoosh on them.
