NBA · 2026-27 · Week 2
The Injury Tax
Tyrese Haliburton is out again, and he isn't alone. What last season says about how much a missing star costs his team, and who's missing right now.
How to read these: net rating is how many more points a team scores than it allows per 100 possessions. Last season, a drop of 5.9 over a full season was worth about 13 wins.
The Pacers, with and without
Indiana went 19–63 last season while Haliburton recovered from a torn Achilles, with the league's 26th-best net rating (−7.7). He came back for the first 4 games of this season and averaged 21.8 points, and the Pacers were +1.4 per 100 possessions: an ordinary team again, not a lottery one.
Now he's out with a strained left hamstring, and ESPN's injury page estimates at least two more weeks. In the first game without him, the Pacers lost to PHI 114–109. ESPN lists four more Pacers out, including Ivica Zubac and T.J. McConnell. Four games with him and one without are far too few to measure his value on their own, so the rest of this story looks at last season.
Pacers net rating by game, 2026-27
Points scored minus allowed per 100 possessions. Dashed line: the Pacers' 2025-26 season average.
Single games swing wildly, so read this as a picture of the season so far, not a verdict. Source: NBA Stats API.
What a star is worth
Last season, 90 players who logged 28+ minutes a game also missed at least five games. For each one, we compared his team's net rating in the games he played with the games he missed.
For the 16 who scored 25+ a game, the typical team was 5.9 points per 100 possessions worse without him, and 14 of the 16 teams were worse. For 20–25 point scorers the typical drop was 2.2. One example close to home: last season's Pacers were +9.0 better with Pascal Siakam than without him.
Each player's own number is noisy. Missed games are few, and they come against different opponents, often alongside other injuries. That's why every row has a range. Look at the pattern across stars, not any one player.
How much better each team was with its 20+ point scorer, 2025-26
Net rating with him minus without him. Hover or tap a row for details.
Show as a table
| Player | Team | PPG | Played | Missed | With | Without | Difference |
|---|
Orange: the whole 90% range is on one side of zero. Right of zero, the team was better with him; left of zero, better without him.
Gray: the range includes zero, so we can't rule out no difference.
Source: NBA Stats API box scores and team game logs, 2025-26 regular season.
Who's missing right now
34 rotation players on 19 teams sat out their team's most recent game. Some are long-term injuries; some are a night off. Each player's injury and estimated return come from ESPN's injury page as of Oct 28. A few reasons come from the box score instead.
Rotation players who missed their team's latest game
Bar: points per game sitting out. Games through Oct 28.
Points per game from this season (2+ games played), otherwise from 2025-26.
Injuries and estimated return dates come from ESPN's injury page (RotoWire data) as of Oct 28. Estimates change often.
One missing star changes a team by about 5.9 points per 100 possessions. Indiana is now missing five players at once, so expect the early numbers to swing.
Method
- Data: NBA box scores and team game logs, 2025-26 regular season and 2026-27 through Oct 28 (68 games), via the open-source
nba_apiclient. Injury details come from the cited reports. - Net rating = 100 × (points − opponent points) ÷ possessions, from totals. Possessions = FGA + 0.44 × FTA − offensive rebounds + turnovers.
- With / without: players with 28+ minutes a game, 20+ games played and 5+ games missed while on the team. The difference compares team net rating in the two sets of games. The 90% range comes from the game-to-game spread (±1.645 standard errors). The "typical" figure is the median across players.
- Wins: across the 30 teams in 2025-26, each point of net rating was worth about 2.2 wins over 82 games.
- Chance: with 41 players and 90% ranges, about 4 would land wholly on one side of zero by luck alone (half on each side). 11 cleared zero on the "better with him" side and 3 on the "better without him" side, so the first group is far more than luck; the second is about what luck would produce.
- Limits: missed games aren't random. They often come with other injuries, back-to-backs or easier and harder opponents, and nothing here adjusts for that. Some "better without him" results, like a team surging while a star rested late in a lost season, are context, not proof he hurt his team.
- Missing now: a rotation player is one who plays 20+ minutes a game this season (2+ games), or, if he hasn't played 2 games yet, played 24+ last season (20+ games), and who sat out his team's latest game.