Unbelievable. There should be symptoms visible before an injury that causes the season. I just can't believe it.
I'm challenging the big man history argument. it all depends, first of all big men probably have longer careers than the rest of players because well they're big and their size is rare. shaq is still playing, what kind of weight is he carrying. not to say yao is fragile, or that this is the medical staff's fault. We just don't know.
I really think it has to do with a combination of minutes/size/and the fact that he has to play year round every year.
Shaq's had a bunch of injuries too. Also Yao isn't just big but he's supersized. There's a reason why there are few super tall players have had long careers while many like Bol and Sampson have almost destroyed their bodies.
Good post and if there is blame it has to be spread around. While yes it would be nice from the Rox perspective if Yao rested rather than play with the CNT I'm sure the CNT probably feels it would be nice if Yao played only a half of the season with the NBA. In the both teams want to win and know that Yao is a big part of winning and are going to try to get the most out of him.
I don't blame adelman for playing his star player 30+ minutes a game, i mean the guy gets max salary for gods sake. His higher minutes this year undoubtedly contributed to the injury, but you can't really fault a coach for playing his players - I mean, they're players, they're here to play
Another thing is, unlike Shaq, Yao has been playing basketball at a professional level since his teens. According to Wikipedia (excerpt below), he was practicing 10 hours a day with the Sharks junior team at the age of thirteen. But the more troubling thing, which I wasn't aware of, is the fact that he broke his foot twice before even reaching the age of 20!
It really concerns me when Yao said he's losing weight and felt tired becasue of the additional minutes. It's because that's means Yao's burning his muscle mass to compensate for overloading. But still, the outcome is shocking.
I posted a while back in a thread about whether Yao was playing too much time each game. RA said when he wanted Yao to rest, Yao said "I feel good". I commented that if RA knew Chinese culture better, he would not let Yao play despite of Yao saying that. Yao is such a hard worker, he would not voluntarily sit down, it is the coach's job to make sure that Yao has enough rest.
Lessons learned. I guess RA will be reevalating his use of Yao from now on. Typical Yao. He never says anything and plays through the pain making the injury far worse than if it had been treated early on. Who can forget that rookie season with his ingrown toenail, that eventually required surgery, antibiotics for a deep bone infection and then cutting away part of his toe bone shortening his foot. Let this be a lesson to the medical staff of the Rockets. You cannot trust Yao when he says, "I feel fine ".
What the f**k do you know? It's a stress fracture, you can find it a couple days after it occurs, but it's still a stress fracture! Who is incompetence? The highly trained and paid Rockets staff or you? If Yao didn't feel much a problem, he wouldn't bring it to the medical/training staff's attention, then how can it be discovered? According to the doctors, the average time takes to diagnose this kind of stress fracture is 4 months, so this is not that bad considered it's only a couple of weeks.
#1 Coachs (JVG and RA). They should know big guys shouldn't work so much. #2 Medical stuff. If that happens so often, they have no excuse. #3 Yao. He should stop risking from now on. He is different as other guys. But it is meaningless now.
We are talking about players 7'2" and up, players like Arvydas Sabonis, Zydruynas Ilgauskas and Rik Smits, none of them played close to Yao's minutes, but all of them had foot and/or knee problem. Even 7' Shaq had foot problems. Yes, players got paid big bucks to play, but it's foolish to used them up just for the sake of short term gain, and lose your sight for the longer term future, which is exactly what JVG and RA did.
Possibly the efforts made by our staff to get him to put muscle and weight on was just too much for his skeleton strength. Besides as you will have noticed that I have complained many times about Coach A over working Yao when Coach JVG had determined that Yao's optimum playing time is 36 mins a game. Yao must be very upset by this news and our best wishes go to him for a great recovery.
