Okay guys, I don't want to jinx it but we're a quarter way through the season and there have been no major injuries except for the obligatory sacrifice to the basketball gods. (Sorry CJ, you drew the short straw) My question is, was the previous medical staff REALLY partially to blame for the horrid injuries we had the last couple of years? Perhaps if we replaced them sooner Roy and Oden would still be playing and LeBron would still be crying with 0 rings. Okay, I'll wake up from my dream now.
I always felt like the medical staff was to blame for Oden. I don't know about Roy. I think there were some mistakes made.
Geez, you need to be really anal about the details don't you? Would you have preferred it if I said we're 30.4% of the way through the season? Satisfy you enough?
I don't think the medical staff causes injuries. Some people are just injury prone. Some people not. I think it was more of an issue with drafting people with known issues (and that includes CJ).
They may not cause the initial injury, but they handle rehab and when players come back. Martell Webster was mishandled. Roy was mishandled. Oden was mishandled.
I think there were clearly some mistakes made. For one I think Roy came back way too soon for that Phoenix series. He had a meniscus tear that required surgery but still rushed back because of the playoffs. Now, that may have been Roy's decision but if the medical staff stopped him would he still be playing today? Reminds me of the DRose meniscus tear this season. IIRC, there was two options: one that would put him out for the season but be better for his long term health, and one that would allow him to come back within a few weeks but would endanger his career. He chose the former. Perhaps lesson learned from Roy?
Just that it's important that we're the winningest team in the league deeper into the season than you are giving us credit for.
Totally forgot about Martell. He came back for one game against Toronto and re-aggravated that foot. Really poor decision by the medical staff there.
Exactly, or when Webster came back too fast and broke his foot again. Or allowing Oden to put on all that weight during his first rehab. That was a huge mistake.
As I posted here before the Bulls game which, ironically, lead to Rose's injury (my bad), I think that the old staff was caught up in old science, and the new staff is willing to accept and implement common sense, modern day sports science. Similar to how Stotts will try anything to make the team better, like the Ipads. It is still early to say for sure, but with so many guys in our starting 5 being prone to nagging injuries and doing so well, I think the new staff is at least a vast improvement. See my original topic (which became a conversation about dungeons and dragons) here http://sportstwo.com/showthread.php?p=3159729
82 regular season up to 7 in the 1st round up to 7 in the semis up to 7 in the conf finals up to 7 in the finals. Could be well over 100 if they go as far as we hope that they do.
Hopefully two of our guys play an extra game in February. Didn't they have 6 preseason games? Not to mention fan fest.
I suspect the former training staff was having an impact on some of the injuries that plagued the team, but probably in subtle and hard to quantify ways. Some of the issues we endured was for taking risks on players with injury history; Oden in particular had some of the funkiest body mechanics I've ever seen in a guy when he ran, but he also had a leg significantly shorter than the other, so I'm not sure how much you can pin on Medina and his rehab folks. So I'm sure it's tempting to look at the team's run of good fortune and draw a correlation between that good fortune the overhaul to the training staff (and its change in philosophy and emphasis) but it's way too early to know for sure that it's not just a simple coincidence. That said, the same way you shouldn't trust a skinny cook, Bobby Medina's dumpy, fat ass never inspired much confidence that he knew what he was doing.
