A study of young athletesin today's NY Times shows evidence that at least some knee problems are heritable. Could shed some light on Oden's problems. Has he just been unlucky? Anyone know if he has siblings, parents, uncles/aunts, cousins with a history of knee injury? If this hypothesis turns out to be confirmed, would NBA and other pro teams want to do genetic tests prior to drafting an athlete? Raises interesting privacy issues. What if a team finds out the player's knees are fine but he has, say, a genetic predisposition to cancer? Or depression? Or whatever?
If I was the team, I'd probably want every test possible done. What's 5k/10k/25k in testing for someone we're spending much more than that to scout, and multimillions to draft? From the player's side, I'd be a little freaked about someone knowing all that info about me. Especially if those someones have a predisposition to leak info all over the internet and potentially cost me millions of dollars (see Batum, Nicolas and Blair, DeJuan)
I could have told them that. My family is a prime example of bad knees. The funny thing is that it was so prevelant, we named it after the branch of the family that brought the cursed knee's upon us. Whenever a new member shows up in our family tree, one of the first things in our family notice is if they have the cursed knees or not. Most of the time unfortunately, they do.
