This term has always bothered me. Many fans state as a fact that so-and-so is injury-prone. Of course, there's no accepted measurement of this. Some use % of games missed, usually regular season only, but this is faulty. DRose, for example, has yet to miss a regular season game due to his ACL. Had he suffered this injury in the pre-season, he'd have missed 100% of the regular season games this season. He essentially gets 4+ free months of rehab. On the other hand, Boozer in his first season with the Bulls trips over a piece of luggage during the pre-season, breaks his hand and pretty much had to pay the full games-missed price. Many (particularly Jazz fans) felt that Boozer also was an "injury malingerer," but with the Bulls, after recovering from his busted hand, he's been an iron man. On the Bulls, Deng, Noah, Boozer and Hamilton have been tagged as injury prone. Not Rose, because it's pretty much been only this past season, though he had multiple injuries this season, and given that he's going to miss a significant number of games next season, that'll be 2 out of 5 seasons where he's missed a lot of games. Noah's only had 2 seasons out of 5 where he's missed a significant number of games. Deng's 3 of 8, Boozer's 4 of 10 and Hamilton 5 of 13 (but he's missed significant time in each of the past 4 seasons). Personally, I don't worry about anything above the waist. Those are freak things. The legs are the thing for basketball players and particularly the feet. Hoops players can't play on bad feet, and when they try to play on bad feet, other bad stuff often happens. When it comes to bad feet, I always think of Bill Walton. That was a guy who was injury prone and it seriously diminished the NBA career of a player who could have been an all-time great. God, when healthy, he was fun to watch! Noah, Gibson and most recently Watson have been treated for plantar fasciitis (though we learned that this was Watson's second treatment). This concerns me, but it seems that, at least in Noah's and Gibson's cases, that this is under control. Rose claims he's had a bad toe forever. This may have contributed to his groin problem. We can only hope that Rose's forced shelf time will give the toe time to heal as well. Going forward, as a Bulls' fan, I'm most concerned about Rose. The primary and obvious reason is that he's the team's superstar, but the other is that all of his problems have been below the waist. Anyway, I'd appreciate any and all thoughts on what you mean when you use the term "injury-prone."
Transplant I largely agree with you. It's a vague term that when put to scrutiny, I imagine would end up having no teeth. Much like "hot streaks" and stock movements, I imagine you can't realistically predict who will get injured from one year to another with any reliability. It's just a reverse engineered causality that people project onto prior events to help them categorize things. I do think that people with certain body types and level of conditioning affects how much someone will get injured in a non-random way (think Yao Ming or Eddy Curry), but that's the exception and not the norm.
I would say injury prone means you don't expect the player, at the start of the season, to play the whole season. That would be minus a game here/there for personal reasons. Sure enough, Boozer had the "injury prone" tag, and he missed a good chunk of his first season with us. What are the chances Boozer plays all next season? I'd say 50-50. Same with Deng and Noah. A player can shed or avoid the injury prone tag, as Jordan did early in his career. ERob was injury prone. I can say that with authority. Rose? He was hit with several nagging injuries throughout the season, then the big one. He's young and we don't know if he's going to come back and be 100% and play 82 games the rest of his career. It's possible, and I think it's our good hope. The other guys, and Rip, now have a measurable track record (% of games played or missed).
But even the track record is no predictor. I think that injury prone has several different meanings. The first is, brittle. The guy has something fundamentally wrong in his body structure that makes him frail and easily injured. Something like Bo Jackson with that bone degradation condition in his hip. Or Walton, or Sam Bowie, or Greg Oden (Hello, Portland!). The second is, the guy's a wimp. He gets injuries that others get, but he can't handle the pain, likes to baby himself. This is probably a result of some propaganda and sports media heroism hyperbole, more than anything. Things like Jordan's flu (wink, wink) game, or when Bob Gibson (is that right) finished an inning pitching on a broken leg. Deng suffered from this more than anyone. And the Bulls went along with the roasting, until Deng was proved to have the injury, and then again when he played through with that torn tendon. It is so much a matter of perception. There is no doubt there are guys who baby themselves. I'm the first one! I was good at wrestling in jr. high. But I didn't want to go through with that training regimen of spitting down to weight, etc. So, I stuck with physics. Of course, there's a different kind of pain with physics, which others don't want to put up with, but I don't mind. Then again, I'm not a star, so probably you could say that I've avoided pain there that divided me from the great ones. I would guess that most people mean the second thing when they say injury prone, and since it is a perception that is psychological (and perhaps a projection of fans' personal guilt for their own tendency to baby themselves), it is very hard to shake once that tag has been hung.
I think Shaq handled the injury prone thing very well. He took a lot of games off, and there is nothing wrong with taking some regular season games off, imo.
