During his press conference before Game 1 of the NBA Finals, Adam Silver was asked about whether the league might consider reducing the 82-game schedule to avoid injuries.

"In terms of the 82-game season and injuries, just a few of the examples you gave," said Silver. "Obviously, Kawhi Leonard hardly played this season. It’s an injury from last year. I don’t really know much about his injury other than he played very few games this year, so it’s hard to tie that injury to an 82-game season. Of course, Kristaps Porzingis was lost fairly early in the season, so it’s also hard to tie that to the length of the season.

"So what our data shows right now, it’s a little bit like driving. Of course, if you drive more miles, you’re more likely to get into an accident. So if you play 82 games instead of 62 games, of course you play more basketball and you’re more likely to get injured.

"But we’re not finding, with all the analytics we’re doing, a correlation between the 70th game you play necessarily making it your — becoming more injury-prone than you are in the 30th game.

"As I said before, where we do see a correlation is lack of rest. That’s why we added a week to the schedule. We’ve dramatically reduced back-to-backs and other things we’ve done to create more space in our schedule.

"82 isn’t a magic number. And there is, of course, a financial component for the league and the players of playing a full 82-game season. But we continue to look at other ideas. Whether we have a midseason tournament and reduce the number of games in the regular season, that’s something we could look at. I think our playoff format is working pretty well.

"But life changes, society changes, entertainment options are constantly changing as well. So we’ll continue to look at it from a business standpoint.

"But I do mean this most importantly, and we talk to the Players Association a lot about this, if we had any data, hard data suggesting that a season that was 75 games or 72 games instead of 82 games would reduce injuries other than just playing fewer games, we’d be taking a hard look at shortening our season. We just don’t have that data right now."