NBA commissioner Adam Silver spoke with ESPN’s Malika Andrews on Wednesday night just before the start of the 2025 NBA draft. Silver addressed a lot of news in the interview, from potential expansion to Cooper Flagg’s upcoming ascent to the NBA.

Andrews also asked Silver about the spate of Achilles injuries that the NBA saw this year. While Tyrese Haliburton’s injury in Game 7 of the NBA Finals was the most high profile of these cases, other stars including Jayson Tatum and Dame Lillard also suffered Achilles tears this year and are facing extended recovery times.

Silver said that it was an issue that the league was investigating, and cited multiple potential causes of the apparent uptick, from year-round training to basketball specialization from an early age. He also said that the league was looking into using artificial intelligence to potentially help spot athletes who are at risk of an Achilles tear.

“This is one area where A.I.—people are talking about how that’s going to transform so many areas,” Silver said. “The ability of A.I. to ingest all video of every game a player has played in to see if you can detect some pattern that we didn’t realize that leads to an Achilles injury.”

On one hand, the invocation of the potential of artificial intelligence is one of those things that is extremely easy to roll your eyes at in today’s media environment. It is the current fad, and the many companies that previously pivoted to the metaverse or the blockchain are now lining up once again at the alter of artificial intelligence.

“We’re going to use A.I. to solve basketball injuries,” sounds like something that would be said at a San Francisco tech event by a businessman in front of an audience of true believers.

That said, there are some practical uses for the technology being sold as artificial intelligence, and some of them are tied to medical fields, specifically the ability to view and compare immense amounts of data to find patterns that might be missed by the human eye. So who knows, maybe Silver really is on to something here.

Regardless of how realistic an A.I.-powered solution to Achilles tears is, it’s not surprising that the league is looking into any and all potential avenues to addressing the injury.

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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Adam Silver Says A.I. Might Be Able to Help Prevent Achilles Tears in the Future.

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