joesha1698 wrote:Well, it proves my point. When your 6'2 and and his size and you play an aggressive style ( averaging 25 ppg) those hurts will turn into injuries. The smart comment was him learning from constantly playing hurt - leads to more serious injuries. So, now when he has something that could turn into an injury - he's smart enough to get healthy and not let it linger on.
This is one of the reasons Kwahi Leonard refused to play when he was hurt with the Spurs. These same organizations and fans ( like yourself) could careless when said player plays through all the pain only for injuries to ruin their career. See Isaiah Thomas. He got injured and didn't get paid and never saw the league again.
I'll repeat, tim Duncan, tony Park, manu - were kind of the blueprint of how to save your body and play the right way....they were the first to do the load management as well. They played unselfish and no one had to worry about putting big numbers up. If we can get back to that in the NBA we will have better teams, actual defense, and less injuries for the better players.
I still fail to see the smart part when his availability is well below that of other small guards of his age, guys like Curry, Holiday and Lillard (before tanking) or even Mike Conely, there is no reference to a guy similar to Kyrie in age and size, that played through injury and missed more games, Kyrie is one of the least available players among stars, I wouldn't consider any tactic he's employing in that regard as smart.
To give an example, Kyrie fights for offensive boards on his drives, he's made some spectacular plays because of it, he actually saved an important ball this way against the Knicks or the Pels, don't remember which, that saved the game, but, this is an extremely risky play for someone his size, that's how he got hurt against the Bucks in 21.
Kawhi refused to play, and resumed to go down during the PO twice, despite heavy load management from his team, load management that was criticized and they are clearly doing much less of this year.
Duncan, Manu and Parker played for a very well run organization, they constantly had a center next Duncan when he was younger to protect his body, and assigned a 3&D player to dedicate screen navigation and hustle to, and having the 3 of them to trust with ball also helped, they also played in a much less spaced era that required much less closeouts, this is totally different era.
Luka has Kyrie (missed 19 games) and Exum (missed 12 games, and is clearly not 100% still and not close to his pre-injury form), the rest of the players can't be trusted to initiate offense, Brunson had much higher usage rate than Luka before Kyrie went down against POR.
Luka's load pre-injuries was totally fine, once the team is healthy again, I expect it to go down signficantly, I hope it won't be too late and the team is still in PO spot contention.
