SACRAMENTO -- Kings television play-by-play announcer and award-winning* radio host Grant Napear will add medical advice duties starting immediately, Kings president Geoff Petrie announced** Saturday.

After showing an impressive ability to diagnose injuries without any formal medical experience and without actually looking at potential injuries in any detail, Napear suggested to Kings management he may be able to determine whether players under contract should play or sit in future games.

"(For years) players have sat when they could've played. That bothers me," Napear told Sacramento Bee reporter Sam Amick.

Napear feels so bothered by the prospect that highly-paid professional athletes could actually be weak Nancy boys he publicly advised this week that Kings guard Kevin Martin might be soft. According to Amick, Napear took to the airwaves before Wednesday's game against the Hawks to state that if Martin, who at the time was considered questionable with an injured left wrist, did not play against Atlanta, it would be fair to call him soft and to question his toughness.

Martin played in the game, totaling 29 points and 11 rebounds. On Thursday, an MRI revealed a fractured navicular bone in Martin's wrist. He will undergo surgery to repair the fracture on Monday, and is expected to miss eight weeks.

In his role as medical advisor, Napear will be asked to make snap judgments without the benefit of medical examination, as he did Wednesday by accusing Martin of a lack of toughness and advising the guard to play without having any clue as to the severity of the injury. Napear also filled this role in an unofficial sense late last season, when on the radio he ripped Martin for failing to play in meaningless games for the worst team in the league due to a serious bone bruise in his ankle. Napear, without any medical background whatsoever and with no suggested inside information as to the nature of Martin's ankle injury, said repeatedly that Martin was weak for failing to play out the season.

In his interview with Amick, Napear continued to press this point.

"I don't change my stance on (his view of Martin's ankle injury) at all. If a player can play, I think they should play," Napear said.

Napear said Martin's current injury is different, that while Martin could theoretically play with the injury -- as he did Wednesday -- a broken bone is a "real" injury, as opposed to a deep bone bruise in the ankle, which is something you just "have to rub some dirt on and tough it out." As a part of his official duties with the team, Napear will be compiling a list of maladies which are eligible for treatment and which must be played through by Kings players. In a preliminary list, Napear lists "breaking your face" and "breaking your leg" as injuries eligible for rehab. Muscle strains and sprains, flu-like symptoms, bone bruises and in some cases death are not eligible for time off, because "someone without medical experience or an X-ray machine cannot necessarily see those injuries with his own eyes, so they might be faked," Napear said.

As per team policy, the details of Napear's contract were not released.

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The Bee's Sam Amick has the scoop:

It remains unclear whether he will have surgery or simply put the wrist in the cast, but Martin won't be returning to the floor anytime soon. He met with a local hand specialist this morning and had the MRIs examined and all involved said he had to allow the hand to heal.

It looks like the option of playing with a fractured wrist should never have been on the table. Martin still must decide whether to cast it for several weeks, or to undergo surgery.

UPDATE: It's surgery. Monday.

Forty-eight points in the home opener might go a long way toward getting Kevin Martin to the NBA All-Star Game for the first time. But a $15,000 check for Indonesian student players might do just as much good.

As a thank you for funding their trip to a tournament in Perth, Australia, the DetEksi Basketball League's All-Star team placed a special message on the backs of the jerseys: "Kevin Martin for NBA All-Star." You can see it in the above photo, courtesy of DBL Indoensia/Jawa Pos. If you'll remember, Martin gifted his $15,000 NBA stipend over to the DBL after his visit to Surabaya, Indonesia, to serve as a coach for a training camp for Indonesia's top 24 boy and top 24 girl players. The cash allowed the DBL All-Star team to participate in the Perth tournament. The squad did win a game in Australia, defeating the Western Australia All-Stars on Oct. 24.

There are reports that Shimone "Moni" Fanan, the face of Maccabi Tel Aviv as its general manager through the 1990s and this decade, has committed suicide. Fanan signed Casspi to his first professional contract at Maccabi in 2005. According to the news reports I've read out of Israel this morning, Fanan was considered to be a father figure to many of Maccabi's players, although there seemed to be resentment as Maccabi dominated the domestic league with foreign stars. But it should be noted that Maccabi's rosters also include a who's who of Israeli stars -- Casspi, Eliyahu, Burstein, Halperin.

Fanan had also signed a pre-NBA Beno Udrih to play for Maccabi, and built the powerhouse teams which won two straight Euroleague titles earlier this decade with Sarunas Jasikevicius and Anthony Parker at the controls.

Fanan left the team in 2008 to become a player agent. 

You knew this had to happen: Sam Amick of The Bee reports that the Kings have banned the use of exercise balls in the Natomas practice facility. In fact. Joe Maloof directed staff to hang signs in the weight room reminding Kings players of the prohibition.

Amick also reports the team is drafting a memo to send out to all 29 other NBA teams warning of the secret dangers of exercise balls. I would like to save the Kings PR staff some time, so here's my version:

"Kings guard Francisco Garcia broke his arm when the exercise ball he was lifting weights on exploded."

I think that gets the point across, and I'd be shocked if any NBA player jumped right on an exercise ball Saturday morning.

More photos » by Don Ryan - AP

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Jason Jones of The Bee has some news from Sunday's practice on how Paul Westphal plans to address the Francisco Garcia injury.

Insert Andres Nocioni as a starter? Nope.

Pray Desmond Mason's back spasms disappear and his body as a whole holds up? Nope.

Put your eggs in the Omri Casspi/Donte Greene basket? Nope.

Stick your three best guards on the floor in the same lineup?

Yep.

Jones reports Westphal plans to rely heavily on the three-guard lineup of Kevin Martin, Tyreke Evans and Beno Udrih. It wasn't clear if these three will all be starters as the preseason moves on, or if Mason will start but cede heavy minutes to Martin and Evans at the small forward position. But Jones did report that the three guards played together with Spencer Hawes and Jason Thompson (the expected frontline starters) at practice Sunday.

According to Cowbell Kingdom's lineup data through two preseason games, the three-guard lineup with Beno, 'Reke and Martin has a total plus-minus of -16. In the second game, the trio was only a -2 when playing together.

A forthcoming Kings press release states Francisco Garcia will miss four months after surgery to repair the fractured right wrist injured in a freak exercise ball explosion Friday. That estimate puts El Flaco back on the court around the All-Star Break in the middle of February.

UPDATE: Here's the Kings release. Two months in a cast before at least two months of rehab. The release does say Garcia will be out "a minimum of four months."

No, seriously. Francisco Garcia broke his arm when the exercise ball he was laying on while lifting hand weights popped. From the Kings' twitter:

Cisco was performing routine workout w/ spotter when physioball malfunctioned.

This is a physioball:

(Photo removed.)

This is how it malfunctions:

What would Francisco Garcia be doing lifting weights on an exercise ball? It's a core part of the official Kings work-out, as you can see in this 2006 video.

Before I knew the circumstances of the accident, I contacted noted injury expert Will Carroll (most notably of Baseball Prospectus) to find out how common weightlifting-related injuries are among athletes.

Really uncommon. There are the occasional accidents, like Stefon Johnson (ow!) but very uncommon.

Last spring, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission recalled 3 million exercise balls manufactured by EB Brands based on 47 reports of unexpected explosions. I have no idea what brand the Kings use.

The Kings Twitter feed also paraphrased Geoff Petrie as saying Garcia will be out for a significant period of time.

UPDATE: Sam Amick has video comments from Petrie.