2020-2021 ROSTER TALK: Archived

[HanspardsShowerVoice]

Seeing Wall and KD 2 years (ish) removed from achilles gives me a lot of hope for Powell.

It's definitely a severe injury, but they've improved the surgical techniques and rehab quite a bit on Achilles that makes it not as severe as it used to be.   They used to fillet your calf like a fish to sew the tendon back together.   This caused a lot of scar tissue and you lost of flexibility and explosion in your lower leg just from that alone.    Now in a lot of cases they can use small minimally invasive incisions.   That's how guys can come back in ~8 months now.    But honestly, we haven't had very many elite caliber players suffer Achilles in their primes (and I'm not including Powell in that category).   The biggest success story is Dominique who had his when he was 21 and bounced back.   Isiah, Ewing and Kobe  were pretty much already washed up when they had theirs.   Boogie was 27, but he just has had one catastrophic injury after another and it's hard to just isolate what impact the Achilles itself had.  I mean, it seems like Wes is the poster child of what a catastrophic  injury this is, but imho Wes was always just a high level role player and has stayed a role player for contending teams for another 5 years to this day. Same for Rudy Gay, honestly.