Anthony Davis Injury Reaction, NBA COVID Spike

of it. But it can be so stressful socially just to constantly have stuff on your calendar, and then when you get married, it just gets doubled because you got all her friends, you got all her family, and it just becomes a whole thing. But that said, I'm enjoying it. It's just exhausting, and I feel bad because I haven't been available to Raj Dad obviously in conjunction with my my grandfather's funeral, made things really complicated. But it's good

to be back. I'm going to be back with the normal postgame show routine tomorrow night, and I'm excited about that. But we're gonna talk Anthony Davis today. I'm not gonna dwell too much on the game last night. I thought it was a textbook, like you know, injuries just sucked the life out of a team. It was one of the big problems with that I had with playing Anthony Davis in game six I think it was Game six,

um of the series against the Phoenix Suns. I thought as soon as Anthony Davis got out there and was clearly hurt, I thought it sucked the life out of the team. They were horrible in the first quarter. They dug way too big of a hole, and it ended up being something they couldn't come back from. I thought it from a strategy standpoint, it was it would have been better just to try to steal that Game six and maybe let him play Game seven, you know, because

you'd have an extra two days there. But it just I didn't agree with that strategy. And you saw another example of that effect last night. Obviously not as some sort of injury management, but when Anthony Davis goes down. You know, when you have a team like this where all of the talent is tied up lebron in a d and one of them goes down, it's really discouraging.

It takes the life out of your team. It makes it really really hard to continue believing in what you're trying to do on the court, and so you can kind of see. I thought the game was kind of trending like the Sacramento game from a couple of weeks ago, the one where Lebron didn't play, where we kind of played down to the competition for about a half and it looked frustrating. But then we just came out like gangbusters in the second half and and made a real

run at it and ran away with the game. I thought we were heading in that direction, uh there, as we were going on that run to start the second half, and then Anthony Davis went down and and that's just how it goes. Lebron also had a bad game, but I'm not gonna be too you know, hard on him about that, considering the fact that he had been playing so well for a couple of weeks. But it's kind

of a throwaway game. It is what it is. The team is still trending in the right direction in terms of their habits, and honestly, they're completely ravaged with COVID.

All of these teams right now. We're gonna talk more about COVID here after we get to Anthony Davis, but all these teams that are down, all these players it's not fair to really evaluate them because they're hardly feeling a fielding anything remotely resembling what their basketball team is actually gonna look like when we get to end of this, when we get to the end of this road, So let's kind of throw away. Moving on, Anthony Davis. I waited, you know, here, it's four pm local time in Tucson.

I waited until this point in the day to to get the result from the m R I because I just didn't see the point and trying to pontificate about these different scenarios until we knew, you know what I mean. And obviously I got back and from some of the stuff I was working on today, and and and it was still hadn't come out yet, and I was about to record a pod where I was about to go over both scenarios, and I'm really glad that I don't have to do that. That this I think this was

the best case scenario. For those of you haven't seen the report, it's an mcl sprain. He's gonna be out four weeks at least before they re evaluate him. But when I saw that, I thought that was the best case scenario. When you see a guy in that much pain, it's just gonna be Oh he's fine and ready to go on a couple of days. That's just not how

it goes, especially when you saw him collapsing in the tunnel. Obviously, I was excited when I heard that they did that on site, you know, kind of like physical test on the knee to see if it had stability. And it was still fine, and I'm glad for that, but I was still worried with the pain. That best case scenario, we were looking at a month, you know, and my guesses will probably be without Anthony Davis for two months.

We're probably looking at about, you know, after the All Star break as a return, you know, and some of the stuff that was going around about what he would do, you know, if Anthony Davis was out for the season was so ridiculous to me. Guys, Lebron's not leaving l A. His family is so ingrained in that community. Now, his son is going both of his kids are going to high school at Sierra Canyon. He loves it there. Would

it be a huge bummer? Would it be really difficult for him to compete with if Anthony Davis had a serious injury? Yes, but there was just no scenario where he was gonna up and leave and go to another city. You certainly weren't going to trade Anthony day Us. That was ludicrous. There was a bunch of really ridiculous things. And it doesn't make sense to make a small trade on the periphery, like flipping th HT for a Miles Turner or something, if you're not going to compete for

a title this year. At that point, you need th HT to develop. So I'm really glad we didn't have to dive too far into that as possibilities that all. A lot of those talking points that were going around yesterday I thought were kind of ridiculous. This is the best case scenario. So for starters, we can all kind of exhale and and take a deep breath and realize, as bad as it could have been, this was the

best case scenario. And I actually so I want to talk about what I think the Laker strategy is moving forward, and how I think there's a little tiny nugget of a silver lining potentially tucked in here, and we'll go over all of that. So I think what I was gonna say is, if A d was horribly injured, like

season ending injured. I was gonna recommend not trading anybody because at that point you desperately need th h T to hit as an all star level prospect to help carry you through this time, and I don't think Lebron and a D are going anywhere, so it just didn't

make sense to cash in in the meantime. But we talked a lot during the season that we would trade th HT potentially or be in favor of trading th HD if the team was trending in the right direction and had enough of that success apart from th HD that you could count him as a trade piece that might invigorate the team, as opposed to if th HD was playing great and the team was playing great, it would make no sense in trading him, And if the team was going nowhere, it would make no sense in

trading him. Those were kind of like the three scenarios that we were looking at their well. I think with the a D injury, now you have to trade Taylor Horton Tucker. And the reason why I say that is this season is still alive in terms of a potential run at the championship. Why because is the teams at the top are flawed Phoenix. The Phoenix Suns don't have that super duper star. The Utah Jazz don't have that

super duper star. The Golden State Warriors, as great as they are, they don't have that big, rim pressuring wing that is so you know, necessary at the late rounds of the playoffs. That doesn't mean Golden State's not a contender. I absolutely respect them as a contender. I just think they can be beat and I think the Lakers could beat them. And so with Anthony Davis making a return

this season, that's still all on the table. And then coming out of the East, you're likely gonna get Brooklyn and that's a team the Lakers have the ability to physically bully. So I think you have to understand the opportunity that is this season once you look at it from that perspective. With Anthony Davis gone, your front court is utterly depleted. Your front court is now DeAndre Jordan's,

Dwight Howard, Lebron, James Carmelo, Anthony, Trevor Reza. So I've got a primarily defensive old forward, a prime merely offensive old forward, and two centers. One of them is a backup and one of them should be an end of the bench guy, So you absolutely have to now go after that Miles Turner trade. I didn't like the Miles Turner trade when Anthony Davis was healthy because I thought it was going away from the identity that this team

was trying to build. But now with Anthony Davis out for at least a month, probably too, you need to find a way to float in the standings in the immediate future, and the only way to do that is to flip th ht for a guy like Miles Turner that can really shore up the front court while simultaneously giving you that floor spacing with his ability to shoot

that will allow Lebron and Rush to carry you. Because now think about this, Lebron and Russ are gonna have enormous workloads over the course of these next two months.

So if you can find a way to bring that talent into the front court with Miles Turner while maintaining that space and keeping the floor open for lab On and Rush to pressure the rim, you might be able to grind out a few games over five hundred over the course of these next couple of months, in which case then Anthony Davis can come back, and now you can really make a run at it. Ideally, I would have liked to have kept th HT and traded in

for someone like Jeremy Grant. I just don't think that's an option now, unless you want to go crazy all in on small ball, and you know, we don't know what's going on in the front office. Maybe they want to go that way. I just don't think that's the smart strategy now with Anthony Davis out, So I would flip t HT sooner than later, sometime, and then as soon as his contract allows, which i've heard middle December, I've heard middle January. I'm not sure when exactly that is.

I think you gotta flip t HD from Miles Turner. I think you gotta go go all in on a front court of Lebron and Miles Turner, with Dwight Howard coming off the bench in Areza and Mellow coming in at that other forward spot off the bench. I think you gotta go all in on that and just try to float things until Anthony Davis comes back. Now, like I said, there is a silver lining to all of this, and I think it has to do with Anthony Davis's weight. And it's gonna be hard because he's not gonna be

able to exercise as easily as you would hope. But uh, Anthony Davis got too heavy. I think that was the underrated factor in his struggles over the course of the season. Mobility has never been his absolute strength, you know, like he's not like a honest like he's not flying around the floor and covering all sorts of ground relative to like a wing, but relative to Biggs, he was very mobile, and he got so strong up top he was almost

top heavy. His center of gravity moved up, it became easy to push him off his spots, and most importantly, his mobility took a dip, and I think it really really was affecting him in his ability to get to the basket. You can trim that weight in a lot of ways. One of the ways you can do it

is just by stopping, just not lifting anymore. And so hopefully over the course of these next two months he can kind of cut that out, watch his diet very carefully, do whatever cardio his doctor will allow him to do with his knee rehab, and he can drop a few pounds, and even if he just drops five to ten pounds of muscle, he might be able to come back rested, fresh, lighter, more mobile, and ready to go on a run. Not to mention during that time that second month, you know,

because that first month he's gonna be resting. In that second month, when he's really just slowly ramping up his movement, he can go all in on working on his jump shot and trying to get back to where he was in terms of his confidence in his shot, the way he was in the bubble. So again, just in summation, I would you have to trade th HT now you have to trade him for a guy like Miles Turner. You have to pay whatever the Indiana wants because you

are now the desperate team. This window is still open. Golden State is beatable. The other teams are very beatable. You have to make a run at this and the only way to do it is to stay afloat in the standings, try to get a three or four seed, and the only way to do that is to try to float this time that Anthony Davis is out, and I think you do that by trading th D. I really quickly before we get out of here, I wanted to talk about this recent COVID outbreak. And to be clear,

I'm not about to talk science. I'm not about to talk about my overarching opinions of the way COVID was handled by the US, and I'm not about to get in any of that. You guys know me. I avoid all that stuff with a ten foot poll, not just in the podcast but in my real in my main life. I think it's toxic. I I have opinions on stuff, I keep them mostly private. If I do have opinions, I just share them with my wife because she has an open ear, and I'm just not interested in confrontation.

I enjoy my life devoid of that stuff, so I don't like to talk about it. But with this, particularly with the end uh the n b A, I think it's interesting to see the disconnect between the way people on Twitter feel about all of this and the way the actual players feel in the way the league feels.

I tweeted a while back that Brian Windhors had reported on the Low Post podcast that there was a big push behind the scenes from players and coaches and front offices to try to let players play with positive tests as long as they were vaccinated, and everyone thought that was crazy, But I think it illustrates and by the way the NFL just had a similar story come back where NFL players are trying to advocate for being more lenient with pulling guys out, especially when they're vaccinated and

they've tested positive. To me, that illustrates a big chasm between the way people on Twitter feel about the way the NBA is handling the pandemic and the way these people actually feel. It's not entirely uncommon. A dirty little secret about Twitter is that there's really not a huge representation of the public on Twitter. I remember reading statistic I think it was last year that only six percent of Americans are active on Twitter. So it's really just

a poor representation of what people actually think. I think that's one of the most dangerous things about Twitter, as we get caught kind of in an echo chamber that doesn't actually resemble what the real world thinks or what the majority of people think. And that's not a right left thing. I think those echo chambers exist on both sides.

One of the things that I've done on twitters try to follow people on both sides, so I'm constantly inundated with the takes from both sides, and you can see there's an echo chamber on both sides and you know that. But the point is is that Twitter in and of itself is never a good indicator of what people actually think. So if you're on your couch and you're watching all these positive tests pile up and you're thinking the league needs to stop, or that there's some sort of crisis

materializing here, that's not actually the case. There is a crisis in the sense that the quality of the television project product is struggling, right, Like, guys missing games is no good for the quality of what we're watching on TV. However, the league has made it very clear that they're not stopping. And one of the biggest reasons why is the league is aware of the sentiment of its players. So, for instance, I I thought this was crazy when we were talking

about the bubble. Everyone was talking about like why would we start. There was a bunch of people on Twitter saying, why would we restart the the NBA season and the bubble? It's a pointless risk. This is that we're doing this just to chase money. And I was one of the many people who pointed out, like, hey, the bubble is gonna be safer than the real world. The guys in there are gonna be obeyed really really strict protocols, and

guys in the real world just weren't doing that. And I was proven right, and most I feel like most people were kind of where I was at on that, and the league had zero positive tests inside the bubble ended up being a huge success. And the reason why is because, guess what, these are young, successful professionals, and they don't think the way that Twitter thinks. They like going out and doing stuff. They like going to the clubs, they like going to bars. They like going to a

buddy's house and having a glass of wine. They like, you know, being with their family. They like having a barbecue like you know, they like going to whatever the heck it is that they like to do as activities. They have no intention of stopping those things. If you pause the league, these guys are gonna go lock themselves in their houses. They're not gonna go you know, social distance and wear masks and never put themselves at risk. That's just not reality. If the league pause for a month,

guys would just continue to get COVID. So the reality here is that they just have to find a way to slow it down to the point where it can you can have a functional season where the positive tests are few and far between instead of being a huge problem that's going to cause you know, these games where you have five G leaguers on the floor filling in for guys who are in health and safety protocols. You just have to find a way to get through this

next couple of months. And you know, the interesting little

sub story here is last season. This was something Joe l Embiad said and in a postgame interview, he's like, you know, we had all of these good smart rules last year and then we ditched them all and he's like, out, this year was unprofessional, And he has a good point in the sense, and for the record, I'm going to defend the league here, you know, Like I think even Anthony Faucci and had came out and said that during the pandema, during the vaccination campaigns early in the year,

in like January and February, I think he said like, hey, if we get everybody vaccinated, you know, we're not going to have any more surges, Like the surges will be a thing of the past. And that was kind of what everyone was expecting because the original data that came out with the vaccine was so good in terms of its ability to avoid infection. Also, when they were doing the vaccinations, cases were plumbering and plumbering and plumbering and plumbering.

So we all thought that this year would be mostly back to normal, including the NBA. So of course the players Association negotiated stopping daily testing for people who are vaccinated. Well, it turns out that that was a bad decision, but we didn't know hindsight. It's easy right now to be like this was stupid. They were going off of the information that was available at the time. Okay, so now

here we're at. We we were in a situation where we had all these guys who are testing pot and who are not testing, who were positive asymptomatic, vaccinated people carrying COVID around and spreading it around everybody in these locker rooms, and so you end up with seventy five people getting COVID in six weeks. So all you have to do is adjust to new information. They just need to go back to the same protocol as they had last year, go back to masking, go back to testing

every day. If someone in the locker room does get COVID, then at least you're getting them out of the locker room right away instead of waiting for them to infect seven people before you can find it. There's an easy fix here. It'll be really really rough for the next couple of weeks, which is gonna suck because it's gonna hurt the Christmas Day games and it's gonna hurt you know, a bunch of Marquee primetime games. And it is what

it is. But they there is another side. There is a light at the end of this tunnel, and the league isn't stopping. They're gonna put the league guys in there. They're gonna sign the Isaiah thomas Is and the James ennis Is of the world, and they're gonna try to make this work. And at the end of the day, cases will eventually calm down. Guys. They'll be tested in the locker room so you won't have outbreaks on the teams and things will go back to normal. Just in general,

it's just a general rule of thumb. Never care about something more than the person who's actually involved cares about it. This is it's it's a way to avoid your own stress levels. You know. A little short anecdote, I play in a men's league on Sundays, and I've been doing it for years now and I have a good rhythm and group now. But when I first started doing the men's leagues, I used to get really frustrated because I

took the game so seriously. I practiced, you know, on my individual game, and I went into those games and I tried to win them at the best of my ability. Why because I'm a former college athlete. It's baked into who I am as a competitor, and when I get on a basketball court, I'm trying to kill you. That's just who I am as a as a guy on the court. Well, you know, I would get annoyed that some of the guys on my team wouldn't care as much as I would, and I wouldn't be something I

said to them directly. I would just complain to my wife about it in the car on the way home. And my wife said something to me, and it was so profound. She goes, Honey, don't ever expect them to care as much as you do. You know, like you care a certain amount and that's good for you, But to these guys, it's just for fun, you know. And it was profound. It's just She's like don't waste time caring if someone else doesn't care. And so a couple I made a couple of changes there. I found a

couple of other college athletes. So I have three or four guys on my teams now that actually care as much as I do. And then with the rest of the guys on the roster, I never allow myself to get upset about it. Why because they don't care. And I should never care more than I should never allow myself to get upset because I care more than they care. And that that's kind of the ideology I would take

that with this. If you're sitting on your couch and you're upset that there's so many guys catching COVID in the NBA, they don't care. Guys, they don't care. So don't allow yourself to get stressed out and get upset because they feel a certain way and you don't. Just if you're upset about it, you know, you can cope with that however you want, but you're not going to get a reaction out of them when they simply don't care.

All right, guys, that's all I have for today. I'm gonna post this one immediately because of the news surrounding a D but I will be there for the postgame show tomorrow. We're on the road in Chicago. The game starts at I think five Pacific Standard times, so plan on the postgame show right around seven thirty Pacific Standard time. As always, I appreciate your guys support and I'll see you tomorrow