Do you feel like screaming a little bit? Maybe not, and maybe this won't compel you to flip out. But my eyebrows were immediately perked when I read these lines from Flip Saunders when talking about John Wall's latest injury in Craig Stouffer's latest dispatch.
(Emphasis mine):
"I don't think, with his situation, having tendonitis, that he's ever going to be pain free from that," said Saunders. "So I think what we're going to do is we're going to monitor it. That's the approach we're taking, but the reason we say day-to-day is because these things, when you go through them, all of a sudden you might wake up the next day and they might be good to go. That's why we're handling it that way."
So my first thought here is: this is why you don't do day-to-day stuff. Michael Jordan dealt with tendonitis during his Wizards tenure, and it ruined him every time he did something promising. The best solution to tendonitis, as I understand it, is to just take off for a bit. The Wizards haven't done that, instead choosing to do this day-to-day stuff. What happens then is exactly what Saunders described: some days, he feels good, some days you don't.
But that's not even the part that bugs me most. It's the part where, at least to someone reading, it looks like Saunders is taking some shots at Wall.
"I think it's been unfair for the preparation of the other players and everybody where we go into a game not knowing, is he going to play or not going to play?" said Saunders. "We're going to try to make those decisions earlier in the day as much as we can."
Here's a novel idea then: why not just shut him down for two weeks or a month? You know, to avoid the preparation problem that you're (understandably) tired of dealing with.
Then, there's this:
"I told him, in the first 20 games, you've missed more games than John Stockton missed in 20 years," said Saunders. "He's frustrated. We just got to make sure that we get it right. We get him healthy, get him right, we get it where it's manageable, that he can play and play at the high level he needs to play at. There's no question that when he's not physically right, he doesn't play at the same level. If he can't play with the same intensity, enthusiasm and aggression, he's not the player that John Wall is. We're trying to get him where he feels comfortable with his body and is over the frustration."
The whole thing just seems like a mess. I don't really care about John Stockton, and I'm not sure whether Wall would either. It all seems preventable, and yet, the head coach is venting about how Wall's body needs to find a better place. Why is this necessary?