Hassan Whiteside, Injuries And Responsibility

Who is responsible? Where is the source of these problems? The Maloofs? Petrie? The medical team? Westphal?

My growing concern about Geoff Petrie’s interest in running the Kings as a franchise rather than just the basketball roster continues.

Westphal’s comments really have no place here. It seems they’d apply more to veteran players on a contending team in the playoffs rather than a rookie. The post season seems to be the time and place for possibly stubbornness when it comes to injuries. But a rookie on a lottery team should have the medical staff saying he shouldn’t play.

and that too was after consulting several experts.

I don’t take this as something where Coach Westphal is in the wrong. My understanding of the article is that Whiteside had a sprained patellar tendon which escalated to torn tendon as a result of coming back when it wasn’t fully healthy. With a tendon sprain/strain, the doctors have to rely on a good patient to tell then when they are feeling well enough to rehab and start playing again. On top of that, rehab is going to hurt. But it will hurt when they are healed as well as when they aren’t. It’s a very difficult tension for a rehabbing athlete.

I actually got the very same lecture from my track coach when I had a strained hip flexor. In a dual meet, I pulled up lame in the middle of the 300 meter hurdles because of a strain—an injury I had dealt with off and on over the previous few weeks. With another race an hour or so later, I spent the entire time stretching and loosening my hip flexor. My coach asked me three times if I was sure I could race the 200 meter dash and everytime I said yes. Halfway through the race, my hip flexor tore away from my hip, breaking my growth player and taking a piece of my hip bone with it. But because of the memories of coaches telling me to play through pain, voices reminding in the back of my head telling me I was soft, I finished the race, hobbling the rest of the way. Just like Hassan, I felt I had to prove these critics wrong, playing through pain. But it was my fault that I didn’t listen to my body, not the doctor or my coach.

And I respect Hassan for trying to work through his pain, but I also respect Coach Westphal for trying to help Hassan understand that sometimes you can’t play through the pain. I’ve had coaches on both sides of it and as a result of being pushed too far by one coach, I had to have surgery on both my shoulders which have never since been the same.

Disclaimer: I apologize for any typos or weird sentences. This was all typed on my iPhone.

They would have just removed a rib and called it good.

The history is troubling. Deriding Kevin Martin to find out later that he had bone chips in his ankle. Then acting like he was faking an injury when it turned out that he actually had a fractured bone. Giving him no credit for playing through it as long as he did.

If I was a player seeing how others were treated when injured I would do everything I could to play through it. The Kings have to take responsibility for how they have treated injured players in the past, which isn’t well, and understand that players are stupid. They will get the point that there career as a King may be in jeopardy if they are injured.

don’t we want to know a bit more about torn patellars before blowing up a quote like this? To be honest I thought the main way they diagnose a strain or mere partial tear is from seeing how painful it is to extend your knee. I thought x-rays had difficult time finding small tears there.

This sort of thing happens all the time around the sports world, specifically in the NFL. There are so many different things that can happen to a body that it’s hard to catch everything, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we have inept doctors or don’t use the technology available. Of course in hindsight, it’s easy to say “oh yeah, this is what we should have done”

I actually have a slightly strained patellar tendon right now, and some days it feels perfect. With rest and stretching, it’s supposed to go away. Hassan (to me, anyways) doesn’t seem like the sharpest tool in the shed, and I could see his knee getting better, and when it was getting painful to just go through it and not tell anyone. This absolutely sounds like a rookie mistake, especially coming from someone who earlier claimed that he has never really been injured before.

Because this happens all the time in sports, I don’t think you can say “this has happened a few times over the last 3 years, so there must be an issue.” I think it would be a bit silly to think that this indicates a pattern. If so, you’d have to look at every medical staff everywhere. Sure, there are some teams that don’t go through this kind of thing, but those are most likely the franchises blessed with few injuries.

I am in medical school. For the record a sprained patellar ligament IS A TEAR! It is a partial tear. The grading of strains and sprains go on a scale of one to three; One being a slight separation of the fibers, two a partial tear, and three a complete rupture. Practicing on a injury can worsen the damage. Also, on a side note the band of tissue from the quadriceps muscle to the patella is best called the patellar tendon, the portion from the patella to the tibia is best described as the patellar ligament It is the ligament that is most commonly injured. Also, tendons are strained, and ligaments are sprained as a rule.