So Maybe The Spurs Medical Staff Isn't The Best After All

(Bleacher Report) – Danny Green played hurt this past season, but as it turns out, he didn’t know the extent of his injury until the season was over.

Green recently revealed on his Inside the Green Room with Danny Green podcast (14:25 mark) that while he knew he strained his groin in an early December game against the Boston Celtics, it wasn’t until his exit physical at the end of the season that he found out he suffered a tear

Well this is certainly interesting. Remember when the entire NBA world kept shitting on Kawhi Leonard because he refused to trust the Spurs medical staff and sat out the entire year because he didn’t feel right? We all gave him shit because every report we saw told us that the Spurs medically cleared him, and that it was Kawhi who still refused to play. Under that logic, it made sense to drag him. But now with this information coming from Danny Green, maybe Kawhi was right to sit out the whole time?

I mean this is what doesn’t make sense. If he knew he hurt his groin in that game against the Celtics in which he played just 19 minutes, don’t they ya know, run tests? Maybe an X-ray or an MRI or something to see if there is any legit damage? Even if Green didn’t think any of that was necessary, that he thought maybe he just pulled it, isn’t it on the training staff to be 100% sure and run every test possible? I don’t want to put this all on the Spurs medical staff, but at the same time you can’t ever trust a player when he says he’s fine. Of course they are going to try and make it seem less serious than it possibly could be.

In all honesty, Green is lucky things didn’t get worse and cause a real problem. Tearing your groin certainly doesn’t sound fun, but it seems like a simple physical was enough to uncover it. That tells me that even the closest of looks back in December would have found the problem. In the next few games it was clear he tried to play but something was wrong, as he would play a game and then sit out, and then play and then miss a couple more. In the months after this injury Green had 32/24%, 47/50%, 36/33%, and 26/21%  splits while shooting 26/25% in their playoff loss to the Warriors. He was clearly messed up. In a lot of ways it reminds me of how the Celtics medical staff sort of misdiagnosed Isaiah Thomas’ hip injury, which probably had something to do with the Celtics bringing in a completely new medical staff last season.

So yeah, maybe we were wrong to get on Kawhi’s case about not trusting the opinion of a medical staff that didn’t even realize player had a torn groin until 6 months after the initial injury. Not the best look in my opinion.