The NBA is continuing to take steps to learn more about injuries affecting its league and the greater world of basketball.
As part of its partnership with General Electric Healthcare, which began in July, the NBA on Monday announced that it has opened the doors to researchers and made a call for research proposals on a problem area for NBA athletes: tendinopathy, or injuries related to tendon inflammation and pain.
Tendon issues have historically been a sore spot for NBA athletes. The medical umbrella includes ruptured patella, knee tendinitis (Cleveland Cavaliers point guard Kyrie Irving and Miami Heat guard Dwyane Wade), Achilles ruptures (Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant and Dallas Mavericks guard Wesley Matthews) and other tendon-related injuries. New York Knicks forward Carmelo Anthony's 2014-15 season ended in February due to a patellar tendon debridement in his troublesome left knee.
The announcement comes on the heels of a Monday meeting between NBA commissioner Adam Silver and GE Healthcare U.S. and Canada President and CEO Marcelo Mosci as well as executives from both parties.
"Player health and wellness is our top priority, and the NBA's research partnership with GE Healthcare is a significant step toward understanding injuries that affect NBA players," Silver said in a statement. "Both everyday athletes and elite professionals will benefit from our collaboration, and I'd like to thank Marcelo and his team for bold vision and hard work."
The deadline to submit research proposals is Feb. 10, 2016 and it will be reviewed by the NBA Director of Sports Medicine Dr. John DiFiori and a team of leading sports medicine professionals on the collaborative strategic advisory board. The NBA and GE will fund up to $1.5 million for researchers over a three-year period to dig into tendinopathy diagnosis, treatment and prevention in the sport.
The league believes tendinopathy is a chief concern and have identified bone stress and cartilage issues as possible topics for additional rounds of funding. For now, it plans to select a winning proposal in April just before the NBA playoffs.
The announcement is said to be unrelated to talk this week of Mavericks owner Mark Cuban funding a University of Michigan study on the effects of human growth hormone, a banned performance-enhancer according to league rules, on ACL injury recovery. Cuban will allocate $800,000 over two years to research.
In July, the league formed a 20-person strategic advisory board comprising team physicians and clinical researchers from various fields, including orthopedics, sports medicine, radiology and epidemiology. DiFiori is a former president of the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine.