Hardwood Paroxysm Presents: The NBA Holiday Gift Guide
I would give the Bulls a competent trainer
By Caleb Nordgren
You’re probably more familiar with the Bulls’ training staff than you think you are. If you’ve ever seen the hashtag #FredClearedHim on Twitter, then you know that the Bulls training staff a) has a tendency to clear injured players to return while they are very obviously still injured and b) used to have a guy named Fred in charge.
Fred’s gone now, actually, having left to take a job at Oregon State over the summer, but the tradition remains. Already this season we’ve seen Jimmy Butler return to a preseason game after injuring his thumb — an injury that would see him miss the start of the regular season — Derrick Rose keep playing on two sprained ankles and Joakim Noah playing on a rolled ankle of his own.
It’s laughably predictable at this point. Rose seems generally exempt from such policy, since he did leave the game against the Cavs with those sprained ankles eventually and sat out the end of a game in Denver because of lingering hamstring issues, but anyone else? Yeah, they’re probably going back in.
With all we’ve been through with Rose already the last two years, inflicting an incompetent training staff just seems cruel. So let’s fix that.