USA TODAY International Edition
Cautionary tale for all athletes
Wolken: Durant, Leonard and playing injured
OAKLAND, Calif. – Since there’s so much we don’t know about the human body, athletic performance and the nature of injuries, let’s start with the most basic fact that there were two teams, two superstars and two very different paths to the NBA Finals.
In one corner there’s Kawhi Leonard, who didn’t accept the medical prognosis of his former team, ignored the noise when fans, media and some within his own locker room suggested he should be playing and came back with a new team that allowed him to play a conservative 60-game regular-season schedule to preserve his health for the playoffs.
In another corner there’s Kevin Durant, who averaged nearly 35 minutes over 78 games in the regular season and played more than 40 minutes in six consecutive playoff games before his calf injury and subsequent comeback attempt Monday that has become the biggest flash point of the NBA Finals.
It’s certainly possible that one plus one doesn’t equal two here. No two bodies are alike, no two injuries are the same and there are always additional factors and circumstances that will drive a professional athlete’s decision to put their body on the line.
But there are lessons we need to learn from what happened in Game 5 of the NBA Finals.
We can’t just write it off as bad luck that Durant hurried back after a month off, played on a calf injury that hadn’t fully healed, looked really good playing 12 of the first 14 minutes of the game and then made a sudden move on his right leg that resulted in damage to his Achilles — an injury that will likely rob the 30year-old Durant of one of the last remaining prime years of his career.
Though Golden State president of basketball operations Bob Myers tearfully came into a postgame news conference suggesting there was no one to blame — essentially, sometimes bad stuff happens in sports — that’s a copout.
Durant didn’t break his arm or suffer a concussion or even tear up his knee. During a non-contact play where he was simply trying to get by Serge Ibaka, he injured his Achilles, which is connected to the muscle that he injured previously and wasn’t healthy enough for him to play 72 hours earlier.
Golden State’s medical personnel surely believed Durant playing wouldn’t put him at risk of further injury, and Durant ultimately made the decision to play in Game 5 because he’s an elite competitor who trusted those who likely told him that dropping into the NBA Finals off one practice wouldn’t put his career in jeopardy.
But all medical advice isn’t equal. Doctors can miss things. And assessing risk when you’re talking about a complex network of muscles, joints and tissue seems like more art than science.
If the Golden State organization isn’t immediately undergoing a top-to-bottom assessment of what went wrong, whether mistakes were made by its medical staff and whether there was an error somewhere along the line — including by coach Steve Kerr, who didn’t exactly ease Durant back into the lineup — they’re in complete denial of their responsibility to the health of their players.
We might never know whether Golden State did enough to discourage Durant from making a bad decision. Internally, though, they need to figure that out.
But at the end of the day, what’s become clear is that athletes who desire to have long careers and avoid major injuries should be less trusting of their organizations and more empowered to put themselves first. And we all need to start giving athletes the benefit of the doubt when they say it’s too risky to compete rather than play pundit about what it means to be on the floor at 70% or some other arbitrary number we assign to their health.
In retrospect, Leonard had it right last season in San Antonio when he tried to come back from a quad injury in December but then shut it down for the year after nine games. That decision — seemingly on the advice of Leonard’s doctors, not the team’s medical personnel — led to unfair commentary from fans, the media and even former Spurs guard Tony Parker, who called his own quad injury “100 times worse.”
The idea that Leonard wasn’t being a team player by sitting out or that he wasn’t fighting through it is rooted in a twisted, fictional ethic that should have been obsolete about the same time we realized John Wayne didn’t like riding horses except in the movies. To think Leonard should have trusted his future to anyone or anything but his own sense of whether his body was ready to play basketball is one of the biggest scams perpetrated on sports.
And now we see in the NBA Finals that Leonard’s approach was correct, as was Toronto’s cautious handling of his health throughout the season. Though stars sitting out due to “load management” might not be ideal for the NBA’s business, it’s hard to ignore the value in it when you’re at the end of a rigorous nine-month season and one star who played maximum minutes is now dealing with a serious injury and another is still going strong into Game 6 of the Finals.
Though we still don’t know who’s going to be crowned NBA champion, Monday will be a seminal moment for professional athletes or even college athletes inclined to skip bowl games: If you don’t look out for your best interests, who else will?