With the news that he has no meniscus in either knee, it definitely raises some questions about Roy's future. 1. How long can he play on these knees? Let's say he changes his game, how long can he realistically expect to play on his knees? 2. How long can he play at a high level? Sure, he could hobble around out there for another ten years. Look how long Darius Miles hung on. I'm just wondering how long he can maintain an All-Star level of play, or are those days numbered? 3. Can Roy change his game from slashing/driving to shooting? I think Roy has shown he can be effective as a shooter, but he is going to have to get much better at moving without the ball, catching and shooting. I think he's got maybe four or five years left on those knees. I think his ability to stay at an All-Star level depends on how he adapts his game. Can he become a pure shooter? Yes. Will he? I do not know.
The only remotely positive comparison I can come up with is Tim Hardaway. Basically he clashed with Rick Adelman (possibly the only player that Adelman has clashed with!) in Golden State because Adelman sort of decided Timmy was done because he was bone on bone (Adelman wanted to give more minutes to a scrub called Avery Johnson). Then Timmy went to the Heat and had a pretty good rest of his career there. But he certainly was more of a gunner than penetrator in his Heat incarnation. Why can't Paul Allen put some of his immense wealth into the problem of knees?
Roy doesn't want to have microfracture, but wouldn't microfracture actually grow him some cartilage? And wait a minute: didn't he TEAR his meniscus just before the playoffs? What happened to it?
Yep. I'd agree. Maybe less. The NBA game takes an enormous toll on the body, and only the strong survive. It appears that Roy is not one of the strong (at least when it comes to his knees). How unbelievable is it that the two guys we thought were going to bring us a championship (Roy and Oden) are our two weakest links?
I think he'll try to play out his contract and attempt to secure a second one before he retires. He might not make it that long though.
IIRC, it's the other knee, that he had operated on in April. The knee that is bothering him right now is the one he injured in college and had almost all of his meniscus removed. As for MF surgery, that's done to regrow articular cartilage, the meniscus is a "pad" of cartilage that acts as a kind of shock absorber between the head of the femur and the tibial plateau, it's likely that his articular cartilage is fine(ish)
It's true that it's his left knee that's bothering him right now, but his right knee has no meniscus either, according to him. http://www.oregonlive.com/blazers/index.ssf/2010/11/blazers_insider_no_surgery_for.html
Well either way, it doesn't sound like MF is much of an option in his case; he's likely reached his peak about a year and a half ago and is now basically the owner of a body 8-10 years older than it should be chronologically -- oddly enough, Miller might have a "younger" body than Roy because of the way he's played all these years.
I think the article also says that MF surgery wouldn't help in this case. He's pretty much screwed, and the only recourse is to change his game.
So true. Miller barely jumps when he shoots, and he never dunks the ball. The guy has been an iron man for a reason. He isn't putting the stress on his joints that other players are.
I was looking over the advanced components of Roy's stats, for this season as compared with previous seasons. His PER is definitely down, so I wondered what precisely was the culprit of his lower PER. His scoring efficiency is pretty close to in line with past seasons, as his defensive rebounding rate. His offensive rebound rate is a bit down, but his steal and block rates are both up. Those last three things are well within the margin for random variation...10 games is a small sample size, after all. What is way out of step with past seasons is his Assist Rate (percentage of possessions in which he records an assist). He's always been above 20%, but this year he's all the way down to 12%. He's gone from a very good facilitator for a shooting guard to a fairly mediocre one. What that means is something to speculate on. It could be that diminished athleticism is preventing him from breaking down the defense, creating open teammates for him to pass to. But I actually don't know if that's the likely answer...the reason is because he's scoring nearly as much with only a very minor (again, small enough to be random variation over 10 games) decrease in efficiency. If he were struggling to beat defenders, you'd expect either to see his efficiency way down or else his raw scoring way down in order to sustain similar scoring efficiency (it's easier to score at higher efficiency if you take fewer shots). So another possibility is simply that in adapting to playing an off-the-ball game, the ball is not in his hands to pass to other teammates for assists as much. Which would not actually mean he's become a worse player, but that he's had fewer opportunities to generate stats, basically. In a sense, LeBron James is experiencing something similar: his PER is way way down (much moreso than Roy's) but that's certainly due to fewer opportunities to generate a stat per possession due to the presence of Wade (and to a far, far lesser extent, Bosh). So, Roy may actually not be a significantly worse player. Granted, this is entirely speculation on my part, but I'm encouraged that his "athleticism numbers" (scoring with good efficiency, rebounding, steals and blocks) are actually not, in total, down. What's down is his assist numbers, which could very much be opportunity-based.
I can't fucking believe we might very well have another Penny Hardaway/Grant Hill/T-Mac in Roy, i.e. a superstar fading very early in his career for health reasons... This should be pretty depressing but the strange thing is that last year's miseries and previous years with Oden made me so numb to injuries that it has taken me several days (and the latest news about no meniscus) to feel really bad about this. If this is really happening, our best case scenario is Houston's course. Overachieve with quality depth, draft well late and wait for an opportunity for another superstar (they're still waiting).
Well, I dunno about the numbers, but I'm finding WATCHING Roy quite depressing. It used to be the case that, at least for a stretch in the game Roy would just take over. He would get the ball, look at his hapless defender and then just go to the basket and lay in the ball. He can't/hasn't been doing that. He's just been shooting jump shots or moving the ball. That "I'll get a layup any damn time I want" was what was special about Roy. It'll be very sad if that's gone.
