http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/100205&sportCat=nfl Kind of funny... and correct.
Sort of. Our superstar has been healthy for most of the year. Most teams can still chug along if they're top 10 NBA player is there. Even still, we were a team poised for 60 wins that will now do pretty well to get 50. If the Clippers even have an eventual top 10 player, it's a rookie with a busted knee. And even if everyone had remained healthy, they were probably a 50 win team on the high side.
But the Blazers are playing .500 ball without our superstar. And with all the other guys out. For the Blazers, .500 is not where they want to be. But for the Clippers, .500 would be a big improvement.
Sort of? At one point we had 7 of our top 11 guys out of the lineup, including 2 of our 3 'cornerstones'. With or without Roy, even remaining competitive during that time was impressive. And we haven't had a true center in the lineup for a long long time.
And the Clippers have two. The only major injury they have had this season was to a guy who hadn't played one second of a regular season NBA game before. He was probably going to be good, but that shouldn't have hosed their whole season.
Or superstar has missed 12 of 52 games (23%). For a fairly signifcant stretch we were missing four of our top 6 or 7 players. The only guys in the top 11 (when all healthy) who haven't missed a game are Miller and Webster. Here's the Blazers who have missed game due to injury: Batum - 45 games missed (87%) Outlaw - 41 games missed (79%) Oden - 31 games missed (60%) Joel - 21 games missed (40%) Rudy - 19 games missed (37%) Roy - 12 games missed (23%) Blake - 4 games mised (8%) Aldridge 3 games missed (6%) Bayless - 1 game missed (2%) So, six of our top 10 players have missed between 12 and 45 games (23% - 87%) - including our superstar and both of our centers. And I didn't even include Perdergraph (27 games missed) and Mills (33 games missed) as they would not be anywhere near the rotation if not for all the other injuries. BNM
I thought all minutes during a Clippers game were garbage minutes. Seriously, he's started 6 games this season and 13 last season (the Clippers have had injuries, too, just not as many as us). He's not great, but he's big and athletic and has a pulse and can walk without a cane. Which would make him our starting center if he was on our roster right now. BNM
In all fairness, he thought he had a better, younger, cheaper version of ZBo in Blake Griffin. Then Griffin got injured in the final preseason game and Zach has gone on to play the best ball of his career. Who knew? I personally thought Zach would be a trainwreck in Memphis, but that was when Memphis also had Iverson. I figured with Zach, Iverson, Gay and Mayo there wouldn't be enough shots to go around and there would be all kinds of bickering and dissention. Iverson wanting out immediately was the best thing that could have happended to Memphis. He wasn't there long enough to irreparably damage their season. BNM
That's all perfectly valid. I'm just pointing out that a typical team would rather have a massively depleted roster but still have its top 10 player suit up for most of the games, rather than vice versa. Yeah, Roy missed 23% of the games. But he also made it to 77% of them. It's a testimony more to his greatness than anything else that this team has remained so competitive. If we lost Roy at the beginning of the season, but had a healthy Przybilla, Batum, Rudy, Blake, Outlaw, Aldridge, and Bayless throughout, I bet we'd have a worse record right now.* At best about the same. Superstars make such a massive difference in weathering injuries, because they can just pile more of the burden on themselves. So you have to take that into account when you talk about how Portland weathers injuries while the Clippers can't. *Note: I didn't include Oden on that list, because I think it's quite possible he could've blossomed into a real star this year if he'd remained healthy and had to take more of a scoring load with the absence of Roy.
