Posted by GKFv2:
Posted by Pharzeone:
A 20 year old, professional basketball player with a bad back. Who requires surgery to alleviate pain after playing a whole 28 games for no more than 15 minutes in any of those games after a period of significant rest. You don't have to be a back specialist, Einstein or Nostradamus to know the Knicks F'd it up big time. I don't care if you wait til the year 3009 to evaluate him. They F'd it up.
I'm pretty sure the goal was to avoid surgery so you have to throw everything that happened out the window when looking at it now. He tried to rest it/whatever and clearly it never got better. He needed surgery from the start and never got it. Let him get surgery first and come back next year and then you can continue the isles schtick.
The fact is that it did get better to some extent after they shut him down after those few games at the beginning of the season, and the doctors we work with made the determination that at 70-75% he could play and it would not get any worse. Based on what we saw on the court, it did not get any better, and might have gotten a little worse with increased playing time.
My issue is with the docs who made the above determination.
I also take issue with fans who think they know whether a draft pick is a wise choice based on 30 or so games of play by a kid with a back injury that he probably should not have been playing with.
Does anyone think that the final result is in as to whether or not Oden should have been drafted before Durant? Oden might just be the next Sam Bowie, but he might also be a guy who eventually develops and becomes a star worthy of being chosen # 1 in the draft. Who knows what is going to happen with any player?
Why not just wait and watch and see how everything plays out? People will have all the time they want to bash the Gallinari pick if, after he has developed physically, he turns out to be just a 15MPG jump shooter with a gimpy back and "stiff legs." Personally, I will be more upset if his back heals completely and he just turns out to be a good jump shooter and not the complete player I thought he could be prior to the draft. The back, if a permanent problem, is upsetting because it was out of our control and seemingly came out of nowhere, but not enough to make me condemn the Gallinari pick at #6, unless it can be proven that Kiki was right and we knew about the injury before we picked him. Sh't happens, and much of it is out of our control, and people can do everything right and things might still not work out well.
People can say anything they want, but nobody really knows how we will be looking at this situation 2-3 years down the line.
No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities- C.N. Bovee
3/25/2009 1:18 PM