Posted by islesfan:
Posted by BlueSeats:
Posted by islesfan:
"Yeah, I'm worried about it at this point," D'Antoni said when asked about potential surgery. "We're just going to do what's best for him. He's 20 years old. We'd love for him to play in the next two or three weeks, we'd love for him to play in the next two or three months, but he's got to be 100 percent well. From that point, we'll see. And I don't know when that point will be."
I'm pretty sure that if Gallinari is still injured but being allowed to play, we aren't going to be the ones destroying him.
Thank you.
It's obviously a figure of speech or turn of phrase. If they weren't going to play him until he was 100% why would they feel the need to see how it goes from there? He probably meant until he was cleared to play (obviously at reduced minutes) or a decision was made that surgery would not be done this season, etc.
But instead of being realistic, at the moment he said that and Gallo got a minute or two on the floor you decided the Kid was in fact 100% and you could judge him against every other rookie in the league in order to prove the pick was botched.
It's not that the quote was so loaded with meaning, it was just an opportunity for you to add to your arsenal. From that point on you weren't limited to solely bashing him for being damaged goods, then you could argue he's fatally damaged and/or he sucks.
Or more likely, by "from that point", he's saying that it could be months from now and he's a rookie, so to talk about how he would eventually be worked in would be incredibly premature.
That too is a reasonable interpretation that in no way means that the second he's put in a game it means he's 100%
So how much longer are you and others going to use his injury as a crutch?
What crutch? I don't even participate in the conversations that try to "settle once and for all" what kind of player he is or will become. I simply watched his rate of recovery and understood that nothing had dramatically changed between when they started giving him minutes and the two weeks prior when things still hurt and were stiff. I understood that they were giving things a try to monitor whether he got better, worse or stayed the same. I'm sure you did too, in spite of playing the angles.
Let me ask this of you, since you're certain he's 100%, are you now saying he's not damaged goods? Or are you hoping that he is damaged and the playing time will insure he never recovers so you can crucify D'Antoni with it?
And what is your crucial point here, that D'Antoni is a particularly untrustworthy and mendacious person? Or he's an inane fool without a clue?
Would other coaches and GMs would be treating the situation much differently? How differently would you be treating it? What IS the point?
[Edited by - blueseats on 02-27-2009 11:10 PM]
