The WNBA schedule has long been a topic of discussion, and in the 2025 season, that discussion has only grown. The 2025 season, the longest in WNBA history, was rife with injuries and scheduling whiplash. Pair that with the ongoing collective bargaining agreement (CBA) negotiations between the league and the WNBPA, and you have an opportunity to go back to the drawing board and get creative.
Player health is a rare topic that players and the league should have a common interest in addressing, as injuries are particularly detrimental in such a star-centric league during a period of pivotal growth.
A condensed, irregular schedule worsens fatigue and increases injury risk. As documented here at The IX Basketball, the 2025 season yielded historically high injury totals and injury rates that continue to trend upward. Recent changes, including an odd number of teams in 2025 and a longer postseason, have further complicated the schedule-making process.
As negotiations wage on, and any 2026 schedule remains on hold, let’s dive into some important trends and what medical research can tell us about their effects. Schedule data is compiled from Her Hoop Stats, and injury data is from The IX Basketball’s injury tracker, unless otherwise noted.
How bad are back-to-backs?
Everyone’s favorite topic to point to when discussing injuries, back-to-backs have become a more frequent occurrence in recent seasons. After slowly winding down in the schedule around 2016, when there were just 16 back-to-backs, they increased to 24 in 2024 and 30 in 2025, both higher than any season since 2015.
Sadly, as far as answering this question with WNBA data, this sample size is quite small. As such, consider this a blinking neon sign emblazoned with the phrase “correlation is not causation” before we continue.
The second games of back-to-backs have made up 4.2% of all regular-season games for the average team since 2023, but only 3.3% of in-season injuries (19 of 582) have occurred during the second game of a back-to-back.
Again, recall the previously mentioned flashing neon sign, but the fact that injuries have actually been less common in the second game of a back-to-back is an interesting data point. NBA studies suggest that schedule density, including back-to-backs, contributes to higher injury incidence rates.
Beyond mere sample size and variance, possible reasons for this trend are relatively thin. One factor may be the differing travel tendencies of the WNBA and NBA. Prior to May 2024, teams were not allowed full-time charter flights, which largely limited back-to-backs to home games, whereas charter flights allow for split-location back-to-backs.
Another possible explanation for some of this gap is load management. As will be discussed later, the current WNBA rules, for various reasons, impede effective load management. Still, it is possible teams have been targeting back-to-backs as an exception to that pattern, thereby lowering injury rates below what one would expect.
The IX Basketball, a 24/7/365 women’s basketball newsroom powered by The Next
The IX Basketball: A basketball newsroom brought to you by The IX Sports. 24/7/365 women’s basketball coverage, written, edited and photographed by our young, diverse staff and dedicated to breaking news, analysis, historical deep dives and projections about the game we love.
Are injuries more prevalent in certain parts of the season?
Most of the research — from basketball and other sports — suggests that athletes are most susceptible to injury when transitioning from relatively little activity to relatively a lot. In most team sports, this is the period from the beginning of the preseason through the first month or so of the regular season.
The WNBA has a relatively short preseason compared to other sports and leagues, with each team typically playing only a couple of games and squeezing in a few weeks of practice before the regular season begins. Theoretically, this increases the risk of injury within the first parts of the regular season.
This is supported by the data in The IX Basketball’s injury tracker, but with a caveat. May has averaged 2.9 injuries per day from 2023 to 2025, which decreases to 1.6-1.9 in the intervening months. The caveat, though, is that injuries that occurred during the offseason but resulted in a game missed in May would count towards the overall May total, overestimating the actual impact of the early season on injury risk.
Even still, those offseason injuries carried into the season shouldn’t be wholly discounted. For most WNBA athletes, there is no true offseason; instead, they play in other leagues worldwide. Furthermore, the second-hand impact of offseason play is harder to quantify, but it certainly explains some of the additional difference between May injury rates and injury rates later in the season. Which gets into…
If the season gets longer, how will that impact recovery?
All tissues in the body heal, structurally, at relatively predictable intervals, with more severe damage taking longer to heal. This is why it can be estimated that it will take at least 4-6 weeks for an athlete to recover from a moderate hamstring strain because it takes that long for the torn muscle tissue to repair itself.
However, it is also known that the newly repaired tissue is more fragile than the original tissue — it has a different microscopic structure — and it takes time beyond the initial 4-6 week window to replace the fragile tissue with tissue that is more akin to the original. This is why ongoing rehabilitation and strength training are so important following a return from injury; the athlete may appear physically ready and perform to their standards, but on a microscopic level, the tissue may still require further strengthening to prevent re-injury.
On a more granular level, tissue damage may accumulate over the course of a season at a sub-clinical level. This is often referred to as micro-damage or micro-tears; micro-tearing of the muscle tissue is what causes soreness the day after a game or strenuous workout, not lactic acid accumulation, as we’re often told growing up. If an athlete is not provided with sufficient recovery time to allow these micro-tears to, well, recover, they may progress to strains or sprains, or at the very least result in reduced athletic performance.
The result is a seemingly destructive combination: A dense regular season that increases micro-damage and not enough recovery time in the offseason to allow said damage to heal. This combination is one of the leading theories behind why year-round play is a driving force behind the uptick in WNBA injuries. This problem will likely compound if/when the WNBA adds further games to the regular season schedule without meaningfully increasing the number of days contained within the season.
Want even more women’s sports in your inbox?
Subscribe now to The IX Sports and receive our daily women’s sports newsletter covering soccer, tennis, basketball, golf, hockey and gymnastics from our incredible team of writers. That includes Basketball Wednesday from founder and editor Howard Megdal.
Readers of The IX Basketball now save 50% on their subscription to The IX.
What benefits would larger rosters bring?
Put simply, larger rosters would allow teams to load manage more efficiently. “Load management” has become synonymous with “sitting out games” in recent years, but effective load management is much more nuanced.
Teams track the health and performance of their athletes in various ways, including, but not limited to, regular athletic output testing, subjective assessments of exertion and readiness, mental well-being, sleep quality, and dietary habits.
True load management involves compiling all that data and determining the athlete’s readiness to perform; if the data indicates that the athlete is fatigued — whether mentally, physically or emotionally — it is up to the coaches and performance staff to determine if their load needs to be reduced. This could involve sitting out the second game of a back-to-back, reducing the duration and intensity of their regular practice routine, or dedicating the entire practice to low-impact exercises, such as riding a stationary bike.
As the roster size currently stands, most teams struggle to effectively act on the insights their data provides, as the knock-on effect of giving one player more rest is that it heightens the workload for the players who are called upon to fill those game minutes or practice reps.
As a result, the benefit of expanded rosters would be cyclical: worn-down players could be comfortably rested, aiding their own recovery, while the extra workload placed on players who are healthy on paper could be spread across more players, thus resulting in fewer players whose wear and tear turns into more serious injuries.
However, it should be noted that this idea is simply a logical extension based on exercise science and rehabilitation theory. In English: Look at the NBA. The NBA also has a condensed schedule relative to the number of games it plays and is seeing recent trends of increased injury occurrence, despite having larger roster sizes and more resources. Clearly, increasing the number of athletes in the league is not a cure-all, but it would likely be a step in the right direction.
“Becoming Caitlin Clark” is out now!
Howard Megdal’s newest book is here! “Becoming Caitlin Clark: The Unknown Origin Story of a Modern Basketball Superstar” captures both the historic nature of Clark’s rise and the critical context over the previous century that helped make it possible, including interviews with Clark, Lisa Bluder (who also wrote the foreword), C. Vivian Stringer, Jan Jensen, Molly Kazmer and many others.