JA Adande on Portlands medical staff

And it's possible he needs to be surrounded by a different medical and training staff. Oden's knee troubles are the latest in a Portland line that includes Zach Randolph, Darius Miles, Joel Przybilla and Brandon Roy, the franchise player who limped through the playoffs and currently is on the shelf for at least a week. I've had NBA people from inside and outside the organization cast wary eyes on the Trail Blazers' medical ways.

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/columns/story?columnist=adande_ja&page=Oden-101118

there has to be something to it

 

If I were paul allen I would blow up the training facility and build a new one with new equipment and everything.

 

Even if Jay Jensen isn't responsible in some small way for the knee injuries, he certainly isn't helping much. He needs to hit the bricks.

 

change for change sake might just be the best thing for all parties involved.

 

Fuck Adande.

 

I kind of doubt Jensen and team would agree with it being the best thing for all parties.

 

Exactly what I've been saying for a while. Whether or not they know what they're doing, they've proven extremely ineffective at their job. That's all that really matters, even if it's just bad luck.

 

Sports writers are usually barely qualified to critique athletes, critiquing doctors seems like pretty tenuous stuff.

 

I'm not so sure, they might have been taking the high road before the firings start.

 

I really don't understand the undying love for the medical staff. These guys have been here too long. It's time to breath some new and fresh air into the franchise from a medical point of view.

 

Pretty hard to judge the performance of our staff when we don't know how it compares with other staffs. Does anyone KNOW how many knee injuries are suffered by other teams compared to ours? Is our percentage of problems higher than other teams percentage?

I'm neither for or against our staff. I'm just a simple statistician who wants to see some more numbers and not emotional outbursts from the ignorant. (I'm ignorant too.)

Basketball is really tough on knees. Are we getting statistically more knee problems than our share?

maybeso

 

I guarantee you that a third of the roster lost to season-ending knee injuries is unusual.

I sort of hope the staff is released -- just to see if they get picked up elsewhere. I'm curious what their value really is around the league...

My gut feeling, though, is that Nate is more to blame for causing problems than the training staff is for not fixing them. There was the mention recently of him running too intense of practices, and I've never liked his rigid emphasis on the pre-season conditioning test and everyone reportedly coming into the season in "the best shape of his life." You can't be up all the time, and if you don't understand that, you stubbornly get them up too early and they fall apart when it counts. There's little the trainers can do in that case.

 

I gave up on this idea years ago for Allen, and after the email to Memphis for Miller.

 

From the Blazers staff point of view: Don't fix what isn't broken.

owait.

 

Nah, that was a classic Washington, DC tactic. "I give [insert name here] my full support". Two weeks later they resign.

Did you hear Cho's inflection? He was as wooden as Joel in those Ford pickup commercials. He didn't buy what he was saying. It was a script.

 

If I were an opposing team that was interested in Oden, I'd start a dialogue with Conley's dad poisoning the well about the Blazers' medical staff. I'm old enough to remember how Walton's anger toward Dr. Cook/Ron Culp forced us to trade him. It would be pretty easy to make a case that GO's gotten bad medical advice and it's cost him tens of millions of dollars.

 

Dr. Jack had a mile run conditioning test on the first day of camp. Pat Riley ran some of the hardest practices around; Brian Grant lost 20 lbs of fat I didn't even know he had when he was with the Heat. It's possible for players to be pushed in practice and to stay healthy.