And oh, by the way . . .
Darius Miles played in his 10th game last night, getting 10 points in 14 minutes for the Memphis Grizzlies. Permanently unfit to play? Afraid not, so there goes that salary-cap space.
By the way, it was an independent doctor — not a team physician — who declared Miles permanently unfit to play. And I doubt it was too difficult to find a doctor willing and able to come to that conclusion. On the whole, doctors nowdays have become very cautious when it comes to athletic injuries — particularly doctors who don’t regularly deal with sports. They’re playing it very safe. A lot of it, they tell me, is due to the threat of a lawsuit. Malpractice, you know. You can find that when you take your children to a doctor with a sports-related injury.
Very often, the physician will err way over on the safe side of a prognosis. He or she will tell you to keep the kid out all season — or many more games than is necessary, just to be on the safe side. In today’s world, it’s better and easier just to say, “Hey — don’t play” than it is to say, “Tape it up, gut it out and see what happens,” which is what they used to say when I was a kid.
My hat’s off to the men who serve as team doctors and athletic trainers in today’s world. Man, with what players are worth to teams, that’s a job with major responsibility. And to decide when a player’s ready to get back and play — those are big-time decisions every single time.
NBA, Trail Blazers | Dwight Jaynes | January 17, 2009
Darius Miles, Dwight Jaynes, Memphis Grizzlies, NBA, Portland Trail Blazers, team doctors
From what I understand, Darius’ microfracture wasn’t completely successful, and his knee did not grow back sufficient cartilage to cover the articular surface and he has direct bone-to-bone contact in the joint space. Plus the cartilage that grows back after microfracture is more scar-like than cartilage-like (we actually nickname it ‘scartilage’). Either way, the way I understood it, the physician didn’t rule Miles’ injury career ending because he would be physically incapable of playing basketball the remainder of his life, but rather because the physical act of playing basketball again would basically guarantee disabling outcomes such as early-onset osteoarthritis and knee replacement. Think of it as a when Steve Young got his seventh concussion. Could he have come back to play football and still been a serviceable QB for a few more years? You betcha, but he was already showing signs of cumulative postconcussive syndrome and the risk of playing again was too great to his long term health. Thus his seventh concussion, while not permanently disabling, was “career ending.” The analogy holds well for Miles. I respect his hard work and stubbornness to make a comeback of this sort, but I agree with the independent physician’s assessment – in no way could this comeback be recommended medically, even if he can still put a ball in a hoop.
It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out as to how much playing time he’s going to get from this point and if the team truly plans on involving him in the rotation. Those are pretty good stats for anyone, let alone someone tagged as having a career ending injury. Gotta give props to Darius for getting to this point. And does anyone really believe that he went through all this rehab just to screw the Blazers? I think not.