A bad break, but no permanent damage
Catastrophic injury didn’t ruin George’s career or Team USA
LAS VEGAS — Mason Plumlee of the Denver Nuggets paid a visit to the NBA’s annual summer league here in the desert last month and, as a spectator, found his gaze drawn to the base of the baskets at the old Thomas & Mack Center.
Plumlee was nagged by the thought that the basket stanchions looked no farther away from the baseline than they did on that fateful night five years earlier, when a USA Basketball scrimmage inside the same arena was brought to a halt after a gruesome lower leg fracture suffered by Paul George.
Plumlee was on the Thomas & Mack floor then as a soon-to-be surprising addition to the U.S. team that would proceed to Spain and win that year’s FIBA World Cup. The scary scenes that followed George’s harrowing landing won’t soon be forgotten by anyone who saw them — particularly at close range, in real time, like Plumlee did.
“What’s crazy is that I’ve seen two of those live,” Plumlee said this week at USA Basketball’s latest training camp, recalling a similarly ghastly open tibia fracture suffered by Louisville’s Kevin Ware in Plumlee’s final game as a collegian at Duke.
It’s no wonder, then, that Plumlee, while watching the Nuggets’ summer league team, kept asking himself: “Did they really move the basket standards back?” In George’s case, despite the insistence afterward from the game’s organizers that conditions had been safe, there was considerable discussion that an insufficient distance between the stanchion and the baseline played a role in George’s injury.
No such concerns are expected Friday night, when Plumlee and the other players vying for 12 spots on the next U.S. World Cup team will take part in a intrasquad scrimmage at T-Mobile Arena. One of the legacies of the George catastrophe was a change in the NBA operations manual, which requires a minimum distance of 6 feet between the foot of the basket support and the baseline, up from 4 feet.
And, yes, Sin City’s 3-year-old sports venue is in compliance.
Yet the mere mention of the word “scrimmage” in Las Vegas inevitably evokes images of what happened to George. That’s the reality even when both player and program can gratefully say, on this unpleasant five-year anniversary, that they have rebounded as well as anyone could have hoped.
“It was a travesty when it took place, and it just put us back on our heels,” Jerry Colangelo, USA Basketball’s managing director, said Thursday. “But time has a way of healing. The fact that Paul came back all the way and it didn’t affect his career, it kind of minimized what transpired.”
George’s open fracture of the tibia and fibula bones in his lower right leg, which sidelined him for all but six games of the 2014-15 season with the Indiana Pacers, was the first catastrophic injury to strike USA Basketball since NBA players were granted permission to play internationally before the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona.
The truth is that NBA teams responsible for lucrative guaranteed contracts long have loathed the idea of their best players participating in international basketball — before and after the George incident — but fears that George’s misfortune would lead the game’s biggest names to abandon it haven’t been realized.
The strain on the NBA’s top foreign stars is typically far greater than what American players endure on perennially deep U.S. rosters, but Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo (Greece) and Utah’s Rudy Gobert (France) will be headliners at the upcoming World Cup in China — even though both are eligible for “supermax” contract extensions worth more than $250 million in the summer of 2020.
George himself, of course, returned to the U.S. team two years after Vegas to play a key role on the squad that won gold at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
USA Basketball’s struggles to attract stars for this summer’s World Cup bid have been a persistent NBA storyline over the past month. Those troubles, though, are more often attributed to player apathy toward a non-Olympic tournament, along with general concerns about workload and travel amid the league’s rising “load management” movement, rather than fretting about a George repeat.
“No, sir,” Boston’s Kemba Walker said when asked if he viewed George’s story as a cautionary tale before accepting an invitation to be the face of this World Cup squad.
Recounting a recent discussion he had with Mike Malone, his coach in Denver, Plumlee said: “I appreciate the guys who still come out here and do this, because a lot of people would say, ‘If something like that could happen, why would you come out here and risk it?’ But I was talking with Coach Malone and he said, ‘You guys are in the gym playing anyway.’ If you’re playing basketball, you’re playing basketball.”
In recent weeks before reporting for the Vegas training camp under new Team USA coach Gregg Popovich, Plumlee had been playing pro-am ball in New York and pickup games at the National Basketball Players Association’s training facility in midtown Manhattan.
“So there’s always an injury risk,” Plumlee said.
Colangelo doesn’t duck the notion that USAB is facing numerous short-term challenges as it seeks a third consecutive FIBA World Cup title with the weakest roster of his nearly 15-year tenure.
To cope with a dearth of options at point guard, Popovich has already promoted Sacramento’s De’Aaron Fox and San Antonio’s Derrick White from a “select” roster of younger players to the senior national team.
USA Basketball officials have numerous objectives as they seek to narrow down the group entering the next phase of training camp in Los Angeles next week. Thanks largely to George’s remarkable recovery, coaxing hesitant players onto the floor is not one of them.
Two of George’s former Pacers teammates, Indiana’s Myles Turner and recent Chicago Bulls signee Thaddeus Young, are among the frontcourt candidates alongside Plumlee for Popovich’s eventual 12-man roster. Asked for his George reflections, Young said he and Turner often marveled last season at George’s emergence as an MVP candidate in Oklahoma City.
“Obviously it was a very gruesome injury, but the good thing is he’s bounced back and he’s better than ever,” Young said. “I would tell Myles, ‘Paul was good when he was here, but he’s really good now.’ That guy is great.”
Last summer, George got a fouryear, $137 million max contract from the Thunder. Last month, George requested a trade to the Los Angeles Clippers at the urging of Kawhi Leonard and clinched the Clippers’ blockbuster signing of Leonard away from the Toronto Raptors in free agency by persuading Oklahoma City to deal him to L.A.
All of that would have been hard to imagine on Aug. 1, 2014, seeing George, with his right leg placed in an air cast and teammates such as Plumlee all around him so visibly shaken as he was taken out of the Thomas & Mack on a stretcher.
“Hard to watch,” Walker said, recalling the broadcast he watched that night while traveling in Atlanta. “Sad.”
Said Colangelo: “If Paul had gone down for the count, it would have been tragic for him and for us. Thank God it didn’t go down that way.”