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In analyzing why the Phoenix Suns have exceeded expectations by staying in the playoff race through the season's final week, the training room is a good place to start. There's likely to be plenty of room, because the Suns are enjoying one of the healthiest seasons in NBA history. Combined, the entire Phoenix roster has missed just 18 games to injury all year. That's fewer than 55 different players in the league have missed all by themselves.
During a compact schedule that has tested depth around the league, Alvin Gentry has had the luxury of relying on a full complement of players nearly every night. The impact of the Suns' terrific health has been crucial to the playoff race. Consider that Phoenix has lost just 521 player minutes (calculated by multiplying minutes per game when healthy by games missed) compared to the league average of 2,245. That's an average of 28.7 minutes per game the Suns haven't had to call on deep reserves rather than rotation players.
From a bottom-line standpoint, Phoenix has lost just 0.3 Wins Above Replacement Player to injuries. That's not the league's best mark because some teams (including the New Jersey Nets, who have lost more games and minutes to injury than anyone else in the NBA) have actually benefited in some sense from having below-replacement players sidelined. Still, it's 2.5 WARP below league average. In a tight battle for the last seed in the Western Conference, those two and a half games count. (The Houston Rockets, for example, have lost 2.8 WARP to injuries, right at league average.)
Ordinarily, such health tends to be the result of good fortune as much as anything done by the team itself. The correlation between games lost to injury and illness by teams in 2010-11 and this season is less than 0.1, indicating that there's little predictable relationship from year-to-year. The Suns are the exception to this rule. Over the three years for which I have complete injury data (previously compiled for Basketball Prospectus by volunteers Dirk van Duym and Joe Dombrowski last summer), Phoenix has lost a total of 189 games to injury. Only one other team, the Philadelphia 76ers, has lost fewer than 250. The Suns are also the only team that has ranked in the league's top 10 in fewest games lost each of the last three years.
Here's a summary of the team-by-team data for the last three years, along with ranking in games lost for each season individually.
Team Gms Rk Min Rk Wins Rk 10 11 12
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Phoenix 189 1 3138 1 3.2 3 5 9 1
Philadelphia 206 2 4181 2 6.6 10 13 1 2
Atlanta 226 3 5330 7 8.4 17 1 4 26
San Antonio 251 4 5013 5 10.4 19 6 7 12
Oklahoma City 268 5 4365 3 1.7 2 12 3 16
Orlando 268 5 4790 4 8.0 16 3 22 3
Miami 291 7 6040 8 7.3 12 4 17 7
Chicago 313 8 7057 10 15.3 24 23 6 14
L.A. Lakers 323 9 5138 6 10.8 20 11 14 6
Indiana 338 10 6458 9 9.1 18 27 2 8
Team Gms Rk Min Rk Wins Rk 10 11 12
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Memphis 343 11 7336 12 7.6 14 16 8 24
Denver 345 12 8238 18 16.7 26 8 12 21
New Orleans 347 13 8148 16 17.6 27 18 5 28
L.A. Clippers 347 13 8188 17 11.6 21 7 18 13
Sacramento 350 15 7748 13 5.9 7 24 11 5
Dallas 356 16 7923 15 7.4 13 10 23 9
Utah 369 17 7317 11 6.4 9 15 21 10
New York 378 18 7877 14 6.2 8 14 10 27
Minnesota 381 19 8383 19 6.9 11 2 19 29
Detroit 383 20 9495 21 7.9 15 21 16 11
Team Gms Rk Min Rk Wins Rk 10 11 12
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Houston 397 21 9685 22 24.9 29 25 19 4
Cleveland 445 22 10608 24 16.3 25 20 26 15
Toronto 459 23 10798 25 12.8 23 9 27 20
Charlotte 461 24 8710 20 4.4 4 18 24 25
Boston 517 25 10607 23 5.8 6 17 29 23
Milwaukee 538 26 11626 26 11.7 22 22 30 21
Washington 561 27 13897 29 4.6 5 28 25 19
New Jersey 574 28 13051 28 0.0 1 26 15 30
Golden State 637 29 15095 30 21.2 28 30 13 16
Portland 667 30 12678 27 38.5 30 29 28 18
Over the larger sample, the difference between the Suns and teams like the Golden State Warriors and Portland Trail Blazers that have been battered by injuries become evident. What Phoenix is doing doesn't appear to be a fluke. The Suns aren't like the Oklahoma City Thunder, which benefits in this analysis from a youthful roster. In fact, Phoenix starters Steve Nash and Grant Hill (the lone Suns player to miss multiple games from a single injury after undergoing knee surgery) are two of the league's five oldest players.
Phoenix truly seems to be playing a different game than the rest of the league when it comes to injury prevention and management. That matches up with the cutting-edge techniques head athletic trainer Aaron Nelson and his staff are using, as described by Michael Schwartz in a feature for Valley of the Suns.
At the same time, the limited control teams have over injuries is also evident from the multi-year data. Take the Atlanta Hawks, for example. The Hawks had been one of the league's healthiest teams the last two seasons before suffering multiple major injuries this season. In terms of WARP lost (figured by winning percentage when healthy, less replacement level and times minutes missed), Al Horford's torn pectoral muscle is exceeded only by Stephen Curry's series of ankle injuries and Greg Oden's microfracture as the most harmful injury this season.
Along with Memphis, New Orleans and New York, Atlanta is one of four teams that ranked in the league's top 10 in terms of fewest games lost to injury in 2010-11 but ranks in the bottom 10 this season.
Conventional wisdom has it that injuries are up this season because of the schedule and limited training camp, a notion for which I found some support in mid-January. With a handful of games remaining for each team, however, that no longer appears to be the case. There have been an average of 3.2 games lost to injury per scheduled game--that is, about three players are sitting out due to injury between the two teams in any given game. That's actually down slightly from the average of 3.6 per game in 2010-11 and 3.4 in 2009-10. The average minutes lost per game (73.9) is closer to last season's figure (74.3) and up from 2009-10 (73.3), but the numbers I've compiled simply don't back up the notion that players are getting hurt more frequently.
One early trend that has continued is more injuries being described by teams as "soreness." There have been 90 examples of players sitting out due to soreness, as many as in the full 2011-12 season and more than in 2010-11 (86). While teams have the discretion to list more serious injuries as simply soreness, this may reflect more nagging wear and tear over the course of the year. Nine players, including Hill and Nash, have sat out for nothing more serious than to "rest," which was previously rare--just two instances in the database over the last two seasons combined. So coaches are evidently treating their players differently because of the schedule, which may have the desired effect of keeping them healthy and on the floor. Especially in Phoenix.
APPENDIX - 2011-12 INJURIES
Thanks to Dan Feldman for using my injury data to create the following chart that compares teams in terms of games, minutes and WARP lost and also highlights the most serious individual injuries.
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Kevin Pelton is an author of Basketball Prospectus.
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Starting Over (04/19)
2 comments have been left for this article. 
Of course, you can't forget the notable increase in "DNP-Old"'s that we're seeing in the box scores this year.
That's not entirely new!
http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/3167/the-box-score-tells-the-story