Earlier this week, Utah Jazz rookie guard Dante Exum tore his ACL, which means he will miss the entire 2015-16 NBA season. The injury came about as Exum was playing with the Australian national team, which once again raises questions about whether or not NBA players should play for their countries in international events.
While there is a lot of good that comes from representing your country, NBA players put millions of dollars and their own health at risk every time they compete for their respective countries in an international event that doesn't pay them a dime. Winning an Olympic gold medal or a FIBA World Cup championship is certainly a unique career achievement that many NBA players wish to achieve, but is it really worth the risk? Should we really criticize a player for skipping out on international events to let their body heal and get ready for the upcoming NBA season?
In my opinion, when it comes to international competition, NBA players should feel comfortable doing whatever it is that they want to do. If an NBA player wants to compete for his country, that's great and he should be supported in doing so. But if an NBA player wants to avoid international competition so that he can be better healed and rested for the NBA season, he should be equally supported in doing so.
If I can be honest, I don't think NBA teams should encourage players to participate in international events so long as the league remains structured the way that it is with an 82 game regular season schedule. NBA players play way more basketball than any other group of basketball players in the world. Even players who compete in the Euroleague don't come close to playing 82 games a year, which means that NBA players take way more of a pounding than anybody else.
Given that the regular season is so long and that the playoffs make the season even longer, NBA players need their summers off to fully recover from the vicious pounding on the hardwood that they have experienced from the past NBA season. For any NBA player to go out and put even more stress on his body in an international event is very risky and potentially dangerous. While risk of injury seems only hypothetical, the injuries to Dante Exum this past week and Paul George last year show us that serious injuries do in fact happen in international competition.
Now, given all of that, is there anything that the NBA can do to better protect its players from getting hurt in international competition? If a player wants to compete for his country and fully knows the risks, is there anything the NBA can do? In that case, the answer is no.
But what the league can do is not make NBA players feel pressured to play in FIBA events. As a matter of fact, NBA teams would be smart to do all they can to keep players from doing so. The NBA needs to remind its players that the amount of pounding they take in an NBA season is borderline unhealthy as it is and that any more playing than the regular NBA grind is putting them at serious risk. While representing your country is a noble thing to do, it simply isn't realistic for NBA players to be expected to compete in international events after going through such a grueling NBA season.
Competing for your country should still be viewed in a positive light, but what needs to go is any sort of stigma for choosing to avoid international competition. In light of what happened to Dante Exum and Paul George, I don't see any reason to expect NBA players to continue participating in FIBA events. The risks seem to outweigh the rewards by a considerable amount.
---Ben Parker: follow me on twitter @nba_lord for NBA news
No comments:
Post a Comment