Thanks to all for the positives. I am “playing through” myself these days, so perhaps I have an unusual amount of sympathy for these guys in this regard.
@HEM: It had not occurred to me that Self might use injury in this way, but given his proven sophistication in using the media in other ways it seems possible. I will keep an eye out for it.
@Ralster: Your remark about Jam Tray is very insightful and suggests something broader to me. At certain times, Self’s teams are among the most explosive I have seen, while at others they appear like duds not going off. I have tended to attribute this largely to the self-fulfilling prophecy-effect of Self going with the normal distribution assumption of human performance (i.e., 1/3 great, 1/3 average, and 1/3 awful). But your remark about Jam Tray’s consistent explosiveness correlating with his robust physical constitution and infrequency of apparent injury, makes me hypothesize the following. Perhaps the wildly explosive team performances, you know, those games where everyone seems to be jumping out of the gym and doing amazing things, perhaps those performances occur when most everyone in the rotation is relatively healthy. Conversely, maybe the seeming dud games occur when 2, 3, or more rotation players are playing hobbled and the team is trying to nurse their way to a win on limited explosiveness due to a cluster of injuries. Its seems worth considering.
@JAF: thanks for sharing that quote by the NBA player; that was perfect pitch on your part.
@Wis: yeah, its not just fatigue that makes cowards of us all. injury pain does too. And I’ve had tennis elbow twice, though never from tennis. Once after digging and planting a huge garden on California hard pan, and once from a foolish stretch of building a few pieces of large furniture and insisting on trying to do it the old fashioned way without power tools to see what it was like. Driving about three dozen screws did it. OMG was it painful! You better believe I got a shot of cortisone for that!!! For what its worth, I had a higher pain thresh than a few, but I always remember this one friend that liked to play knock buckles with everyone he met, especially with me. He had Fred Flintstone hands. and mine were kind of bony. We would stand face to face, make fists with one of our hands, and start slowly punching them together, knuckles to knuckles, softly at first, then harder and harder, until one of us quit. It was one of the dumbest things I ever did as a kid, and I did some very dumb things in those days, but try as I might I could never outlast him. And it wasn’t that he was duller than me, and so oblivious to pain and injury. He was a fabulous student and the first truly great athlete I ever knew. He could do most anything in sport. He just had a higher pain threshold than I did. On the other hand he had asthma and could not stand the heat and pollen the way I could, even though the pollen could get me pretty badly. I could always outlast him working outside in summertime. Every human being is an amazingly unique distributions of strengths and weaknesses. I believe these asymmetries underpin the efficiency and beauty of teams.
