Matt Yglesias

20 Responses to “Caron Butler Injured”

1. Petey Says:
   November 1st, 2009 at 10:15 am

   Blatche!

   —–

   If you folks manage to stay healthy, you could challenge the Hawks for the #4 seed.

2. Petey Says:
   November 1st, 2009 at 10:17 am

   “But are the Wizards cursed”

   Officially, yes.

   You were sentenced to a ten year curse for the MJ firing.

3. Jeffrey Davis Says:
   November 1st, 2009 at 10:23 am

   teensy sample size.

4. Max424 Says:
   November 1st, 2009 at 10:50 am

   I have the Wizard curse. I get hurt a lot. I could use my own personal trainer.

   I hear everyone in Sweden has their own personal trainer. Is this true of Sweden, Matt? Or is it just…more…Socialist…lies?

5. Shep Says:
   November 1st, 2009 at 10:51 am

   @Petey

   You meant “hiring”, right?

6. ed Says:
   November 1st, 2009 at 11:46 am

   The Curse of Les Boulez. Look it up, man.

7. Jimmy Says:
   November 1st, 2009 at 11:54 am

   Have I missed it or has there been any discussion of Tim Donaghy around here?

8. colby Says:
   November 1st, 2009 at 12:04 pm

   Yeah, I think trainers are an overlooked part of professional sports teams. Here in Chicago, people bitched a lot about Cubs’ pitchers Prior and Wood, that they were always hurt. But it really made me wonder if they were getting bad advice.

9. jeer9 Says:
   November 1st, 2009 at 12:05 pm

   If the Celtics’ old-timers stay healthy, there’s not going to be much question about the championship this year. They already appear in midseason form, even without Davis.

10. Greg Says:
    November 1st, 2009 at 1:25 pm

    The Mets’ number of injuries (particular to the everyday players) this past season – I believe – completely defies logic and broke records.

    Considering their history, I would be unsurprised to learn the Wilpons have just hired a Haitian witchdoctor and a couple of guys from Long Island as their medical staff, and that it works better than whoever’s doing it now.

11. rusty Says:
    November 1st, 2009 at 2:07 pm

    This was a subplot this summer in the Arenas Returns! storyline. Basically, Gil started working out with a private trainer in Chicago renowned for being good at comebacks, and while he was describing the work he did there, he took the opportunity to blast the Wizards’ training staff. His words were something to the effect of, “They’d never dealt with a procedure like what I had, so they were making up the treatment as they went.” Considering the team invested $100 million in a guy who basically missed two years due to bad rehab from his original injury, you’d think they’d at least give the impression of expertise, but apparently not.

12. Martin Says:
    November 1st, 2009 at 2:28 pm

    Re Greg — there was a great deal of talk over the summer about the Mets having incompetent medical trainers. The main evidence for this was the treatment of Ryan Church last year, when he was made to take a cross-country flight just a day or two after suffering a serious concussion. Many of the important Mets got injured this year, but it wasn’t so much the injuries as the mist of confusion surrounding the injured players. Players like Reyes would take a few days off for a minor muscle strain, only to return three months later or not at all. It got so bad that by August, reporters could ask Jerry Manuel about the prognosis for a player and Manuel could shrug theatrically and get a big laugh from the room — everyone knew that he was getting rotten medical information.

13. stand Says:
    November 1st, 2009 at 2:46 pm

    I agree that this isn’t much attention paid to this. There was a fairly big controversy this year in Kansas City when a fan blogger (and doctor) suggested that the Royal’s head trainer, who is the only member of the team that hasn’t changed in the last 19 horrible years, wasn’t doing his job very well. He lays out a pretty good case in that post. The front office was very displeased, but the trainer did end up retiring at the end of the year.

14. Cliffy Says:
    November 1st, 2009 at 3:11 pm

    The Nats had this problem last year — people would get hurt, a day later the team would announce they were out for three days, they wouldn’t appear, and six weeks later the team would announce they weren’t coming back all season. It seemed this was one area they had improved on this year.

15. Al Says:
    November 1st, 2009 at 3:52 pm

    They said on the Nets-Wiz broadcast last night that Jamison believes he will return much, much earlier from his injury than the originally planned 4-6 weeks. In fact, he might even play next game.

    Also, to echo Petey, Blatche was unbelievable last night. Wow.

16. MikeN Says:
    November 1st, 2009 at 6:53 pm

    Shorter Matt: I could have actually taken some time to check this out, but instead I’ll just throw out an unsubstantiated smear and see hoewit plays.

    Auditioning for Fox?

17. Fr. J Says:
    November 1st, 2009 at 10:49 pm

    Are the Wizards cursed? I’ve been a Bullets / Wizards fan for the better part of my thirty years on the planet. And so the answer has to be, emphatically, yes. We are cursed. But, it could be worse. We could be the Clippers.

18. Cyrus Says:
    November 2nd, 2009 at 11:12 am

    There seems to be very little attention paid to that kind of issue. But the conventional wisdom is that the Phoenix trainers are unusually good, so doesn’t it make sense that some would be unusually bad.

    It’s possible (and in a broad definition of “unusually bad”, that is to say even the tiniest bit below an arithmatic average, it’s definitely true but banal), but I don’t know one way or the other if it’s actually the case. Maybe there’s wide variation throughout the industry in the quality of a team’s trainers (and the quality of an athletic trainer is quantifiable and can be considered independently from their athletes and the skill of a group of people can be evaluated discretely and…), but then again, maybe there isn’t wide variation.

    In the second case, trainers throughout the industry would all be pretty uniform in quality except for the Phoenix trainers, who are all a bunch of dedicated, empathic prodigies. Someone who follows sports a lot more than me would have to opine on that.

19. mrgumby2u Says:
    November 2nd, 2009 at 1:03 pm

    Though this is something I’ve thought about for several years now, I think this is the first discussion I’ve seen of the quality of professional teams’ training staffs. I’ve always wondered what the problem was in Oakland; does Billy Beane’s method of evaluating talent and looking for “undervalued” players overvalue injury prone players, or can the ongoing problems of Rich Hardin, Mark Mulder, Eric Chavez, Bobby Crosby, et al, be attributed to an inferior training staff?

20. reservoirgod Says:
    November 3rd, 2009 at 3:34 pm

    While the “Curse of Lez Boulez” may have affected the Bullets, the Wizards are plagued by what I like to call the “Choke Artist’s Curse.” Anytime a team doesn’t purge a choke artist from the organization, they inevitably infect the entire club with choking & losing. Once Arenas missed those FTs in Game 7 against the Cavs and the team not only opted to keep him on the roster but sign him to a $100 million contract, the Wizards’ fate was sealed. If the Wizards want to be a successful franchise, then they have to purge everyone associated with the Arenas choking and contract debacle – that means Grunfeld, Jamison & Butler must all go. Nick Young looks up to Arenas, so he must go. All vestiges of Arenas must be purged from the organization so they can begin again.