NBA Commissioner David Stern holds lack of preparedness responsible for injuries
NBA Commissioner David Stern has always maintained that the shortened NBA season is not responsible for the spate of recent injuries. Now in an unprecedented move, the commish has put a part of blame for injuries on the player
themselves.
He was asked the same question, especially about the ACL injuries that ousted Derrick Rose (Chicago Bulls) and Iman Shumpert (New York Knicks) for more than 6 months and the reply was;
"There is some part of it that may be related to that. I think some part of it is luck and some part of it is lack of preparedness by our players before the season began. It’s a combination of things”.
"The one thing I do know is that we’ve had more lost games because of injuries, because the compressed schedule takes away a day of rest for a minor injury … We’re going to look at the precise numbers at the end of the season
and we’ll try to have a view of it because it’s spread out differently as well. Some teams don’t practice.”
The NBA lockout delayed the season for more than 2 months. It was supposed to start on November 1st, but started on January 10, which resulted into 2 extra games per month on average for every team and also deprived
players from training camps and off season conditioning in team facilities. They didn’t find time to condition their bodies and moreover there was only one day break between playoffs and regular season.
The 1st round of playoffs didn’t alone witness such injuries. Players have been falling like autumn leaves throughout the season. Jeremy Lin, Dwight Howard, Stephen Curry, Al Horford and Andrew Bogut all succumbed to
injuries this season and it has played a major role in their team’s fortunes.
Blaming the players however is not the right way to go. It was due to the rules of NBA that the players couldn’t use the team facilities during the lockout and has the owners budged from their stand, which they did eventually,
there would have been enough time for all the players to train properly. But, as things went, most of them came into the season under cooked and that eventually took its toll.
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