NBA star absences are up. Way up.

Injuries continue to ravage NBA royalty this season.

Joel Embiid has played just four games this season. (Photo by Chris Coduto/Getty Images)

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It was supposed to be a feel-good week of returning stars.

Kevin Durant, Ja Morant and Dejounte Murray were slated to return after being extended injury absences. Kristaps Porzingis, Malik Monk and Bradley Beal were back in uniform, too.

That was the good news.

Then there was some not so good news.

• Giannis Antetokounmpo got hit with a dreaded “late scratch” with a knee problem for Tuesday’s NBA Cup action against Miami. Not good.

• Ja Morant was listed as OUT for Wednesday’s game with a knee contusion suffered in Monday’s return game.

• Joel Embiid, Paul George and Tyrese Maxey were all ruled out for Wednesday’s game, the second time this season that Philly’s big three will all be in street clothes.

• Lauri Markkanen banged knees with Victor Wembanyama and the Utah star needed to be helped off the floor.

• DeMar DeRozan, after completing his first dunk of the season, was downgraded to OUT with back inflammation for Wednesday’s tilt against Minnesota.

We can’t have nice things, apparently.

Just as one star comes back, it seems a few more limp to the locker room. The NBA’s injury crisis, as I wrote about for Yahoo Sports earlier this month, continues unabated.

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Star absences up 52 percent year-over-year

Here’s the data I’ve compiled at The Finder: as we head into Thanksgiving, having reached the 15-game mark, a whopping 32 of the 49 NBA stars have missed games. A total of eight stars, those who have made the All-Star game in the past three seasons, have missed at least 10 games already. Those names: Joel Embiid, Ja Morant, Kawhi Leonard, Zion Williamson, Paolo Banchero, Scottie Barnes, Khris Middleton and Dejounte Murray.

And that doesn’t include perennial MVP candidate Luka Doncic who has been out for almost a week with a wrist injury. When I wrote about this glaring trend a couple weeks ago, star absences were up 27 percent. It’s only gotten worse.

Comparing the first 15 games of last season to this season, we’re seeing a 52% increase in star absences. There were 100 such DNPs last season at the 15-game mark and we’ve seen 152 this season. Eight games in, the tracks began to split:

We typically see a big injury/illness spike after the holidays, but that has occurred much earlier this season. Older stars like LeBron James, Draymond Green, James Harden and Chris Paul haven’t missed a game yet this season, so we’ve been fortunate from that perspective.

The NBA is coming down hard on some players/teams who have missed games. On Tuesday, the NBA fined the Atlanta Hawks for sitting Trae Young when the league determined that he could have played on Nov. 12. It’s the second Player Participation Policy violation of the season, the first involving Joel Embiid and the Sixers. A day later, Young is listed as questionable for Wednesday’s game with Achilles tendinitis.

Olympics to blame?

One theory that I’ve seen proposed is the short turnaround from the Summer Olympics in Paris. The international tournament has been brought up as a central factor in the Embiid conversation. Is there anything to it?

If anything, it’s the opposite. The Olympians have been far more available than those who did not go to Paris. In fact, LeBron James, Jayson Tatum, Tyrese Haliburton, Bam Adebayo, Anthony Edwards, Devin Booker, Rudy Gobert and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander haven’t missed a game this season. Of the 15 NBA stars that went to Paris, only Embiid and Durant have been logged substantial games missed this season.

Here’s the breakdown:

Olympian stars: 88.0 percent games played

Non-Olympian stars: 65.3 percent games played

To be fair, some of the stars didn’t go to Paris because they were to injured to play, including Leonard, Morant and Middleton. But that only explains so much.

What else could explain?

There are a lot of different factors at play, but so far, you can rule out the Summer Olympics as having a deleterious effect on player health. The small sample of data suggests that the inverse may be true: guys that went to Paris arrived in better shape and have been healthier. We’ll see if that holds.

When it comes to explaining such a big spike in injuries across the NBA, the answer isn’t straightforward. It’s likely a perfect storm of many different factors, not just one thing. Most of it, as boring as it sounds, may be random.

But I do think that last season’s strong bill of health may have been a bit of an aberration because the looming TV deal — at least in my informed opinion from talking to people around the league — may have motivated everyone to bring their A game. Now that the bag is secured, things are different, for everyone.

We’re starting to see some big names trickle back onto the floor. It was good to watch Durant moving well and also see his minutes come down in his return Tuesday night. Just 30 minutes in the Lakers game, much lower than his pre-injury average of 38.8 minutes per game.

Middleton might follow Durant back soon, per ESPN’s Shams Charania. Let’s hope the Antetokounmpo knee injury is a one-game blip, but it’s never good when a knee injury comes out of nowhere. We finally got some good news on Middleton, just as Antetokounmpo had his setback. The Milwaukee Bucks, trying to piece it together this entire season, is a microcosm of the 2024-25 NBA as a whole.