I am willing to bet that it's an issue with a ligament or a hairline fracture...Bruised foot? My ass! Something else is obviously going on with it!
ehh? Is this sarcasm I hope? Are you referring to the 34 win lockout shortened season team as opposed to the 45 win team last year ( the first year Harden was here)?
Yep, I agree. Definitely looks more than just a bruised foot. Its scary with all the injuries around the league at the moment. Luckily are bench seems pretty deep and we should be able to cover the loss of one of our stars better than most other teams.
I hope he stays out as long as he needs to properly and fully heal... the sooner in the season he takes time off to heal the better imo
The real problem with foot injuries is that your feet don't get much blood flow as it is, and many places that get worn down or injured over time get almost none (see: plantar fasciitis). In those cases, you really can't do much of anything except stay off of your feet and give them time to heal. Seriously, beyond something that can be fixed via surgery, the main solution to foot problems is rest - lots and lots of rest over a long period of time. But if you only manage the short-term symptoms and come back too early, it is almost guaranteed that you will re-aggravate the original injury and potentially make things worse (especially if you are a professional athlete playing a sport as foot-intensive as basketball). It's not just a matter of waiting for the swelling to go down and the pain to be manageable. We don't really know what's wrong with Harden's foot, but I would venture a guess that unless he sits out for at least a few weeks, this could pretty easily turn into a chronic, long-term issue. What is annoying is that a swollen foot could mean a million different things, including a bone fracture. Letting him continue to play through the pain and giving him coritsone injections to manage the swelling doesn't really do anything except mask the symptoms and exacerbate the underlying problem. This is a professional athlete we are talking about. He's not going to just "take it easy" - the level of use and impact that his feet take on a daily basis far outstrip a normal person's, and even just sitting out of practice still means he goes through several miles of heavy pounding per game. What they should have done was force him to sit (as in, as little standing/walking as possible) until the swelling and acute pain went down, and then heavily limited his minutes as he eased back into the lineup to see if things popped back up again. You don't necessarily need to baby the guy, but if you have no proven diagnosis then you are basically playing with fire when it comes to foot injuries and letting people run around all day every day. This is what annoys a lot of us who were trying to be reasonable with our criticisms of McHale. Lost in all the noise about "LOFs only wanting to blame McFail and Harden and wanting Jeremy Lin to shine at the expense of everyone else" is that it was pretty clear Harden has been injured for weeks and that his minutes were being managed atrociously. Even ignoring all of the other issues with how McHale has managed all other player minutes and rotations thus far into the season, this one issue on its own should have been handled completely differently, especially considering the bench depth that this team has to work with from the guard position. This isn't like the Parsons situation where we don't necessarily have a great backup or with Howard where Asik wasn't necessarily "available" to play.
