Analyses of actions which cause anterior cruciate ligament injuries in the national basketball association players: YouTube-based video analyses

Abstract

Background Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries are among the most common injuries in the National Basketball Association (NBA), and it is important to investigate the actual nature of the injury because it can impair a player’s performance after returning to the game. Although the moment of injury has been investigated, the details of the movements and circumstances leading to injury in basketball games are unknown. This study aimed to clarify the actions leading to ACL injuries and to investigate their characteristics, based on YouTube video analyses of the NBA players. Methods Players with ACL injuries in the NBA were identified through web-based research over 10 seasons (2011/2012–2021/2022, through October 2021), with 29 recorded videos of ACL injuries in the NBA. Actions were categorized based on basketball-specific gestures, and determined whether the player was in contact with an opponent or not and, if so, the location of the contact was analyzed focusing on two time points: at the injury frame (IF) and one step before the injury frame (IF-1). The “injury leg” timing was counted for each of the first and second steps after ball possession. Results The majority (68.2%) of ACL injury occurred during the 2 steps phase (only two steps can proceed after ball retention in basketball, so we defined them as two steps) in the offense action, and most notably during the first step (80.0%). 73.3% of players who were injured during the 2 steps phase got contact to an area other than the knee (Indirect contact) at the IF-1, with 81.8% of contact being located in the upper body contralateral to the respective knee injury. The probability of players with ACL injuries during the 2 steps at the IF-1 who got Indirect contact was statistically significantly greater than those who got no contact with other players (p = 0.042). Conclusions We argue that including pre-injury play and contact falls into the novelty category. Through YouTube-based video analyses, this study revealed that ACL injuries tend to be characterized by specific types of actions, the timing of contact, and the location of contact in NBA players.

Incidencia de lesiones en basquetbolistas femeninas U18 de Liga FEMISUR-Chile

“…Este resultado es consistente y concuerda con lo que se muestra en la literatura (Borowski et al, 2008;López et al, 2017;Owoeye et al, 2020). El básquetbol requiere de acciones con constantes cambios de dirección, aceleraciones, saltos y aterrizajes, las cuales exponen a las jugadoras a este mecanismo de lesión (López et al, 2017; https://doi.org/10.29035/rcaf.25.1.10 CAF 25(1) | 9 Panagiotakis et al, 2017;Peña et al, 2023;Saito et al, 2023;Stojanović et al, 2018). Respecto a este resultado, se debe considerar que este estudio se basó en determinar la incidencia de lesiones, por lo que se registraron todas las "nuevas" lesiones en la población de jugadoras que surgieron durante el periodo de estudio, por lo cual, las jugadoras que padecían lesiones recurrentes (por ejemplo, una tendinopatía patelar) podrían no haber registrado esta condición.…”