Blake Griffin had a lost season for the Los Angeles Clippers. First, he tore a tendon in his quadriceps on Christmas Day that knocked him out for an extended period. While he was recovering from that injury, he punched a Clippers equipment manager, which pushed back his timeline even further and got him suspended for four healthy games on top of that.
Playing only 35 games due to injury is bad enough, but the cloud that hung over the Clippers after the punch reflected back on Blake, and diminished his reputation around the league. However, as that all was going on, Blake was reportedly doing a selfless thing behind the scenes — postponing surgery on that quad injury in the hopes he could come back for the Clippers’ playoff run, according to Bleacher Report.
Griffin could’ve and maybe should’ve undergone the procedure to fix the tendon immediately after suffering the injury on Christmas, according to league sources, but it would’ve ended his Clippers season because of a four- to six-month recovery.
So he tried to strengthen the other areas of his leg, gut it out and heal somewhat to be there, even at a substandard level, for his team’s playoff run.
That worry about re-injuring his quad? It came to pass, and Griffin didn’t even make it out of one series, going down within minutes of Chris Paul. Now he’ll receive the treatment, and though this report claims he’ll be fine for next season, he’ll miss any chance he would have had at playing in the 2016 Rio Olympics.
The B/R article, written by Kevin Ding, has the tenor of a reclamation project, trying to rebuild what stature Blake had lost in the eyes of fans and observers. But aside from the fact that rushing back from an injury is not generous the way that punching a friend is selfish, or smart in the way that assault was dumb, it was a choice between this season and next, between the playoffs and the Olympics. He made the choice, and it didn’t work out, and he has to live with it. But it wasn’t the obviously right thing to do for the team, and it certainly doesn’t change what happened at that Toronto restaurant.
(Via Bleacher Report)
