It's just me thinking out loud but what if Nate'd intense practices were the overall culprit of many of the injuries sustained by a fragile class of player brought in by Pritchard? I know the sports medicine guys for the blazers get a lot of flak but what if it were simply that they were being worn out hard between their games?
I doubt Nate gave birth to funky-leg-lengthed Oden or could have caused a young Roy to completely destroy his miniscus. Not saying that Nate had zero effect on health, but that most of the worst issues seemed congenital mixed with the life of a pro athlete.
There is no way to prove or disprove your hypothesis. I sense a thread full of people agreeing, though. Seems as if Seattle would have had similar injury issues under Nate, but they didn't.
We all get crazy ideas once in a while. It's called pattern matching, it's why humans evolved as far as we did. Sometimes we see patterns that aren't there. =] (That isn't really a face, but you knew it was a face)
Lots of teams practice hard and lots of teams have older athletes making deep playoff runs every year (and playing the Olympics besides). The facts are that Roy had already had multiple knee surgeries by the time he got to Portland and Oden's leg-length imbalance and rumors of a combine red flag on his medical probably had far more to do with their breakdown than anything Nate did.
