Saturday night I had two TVs going. Stanley Cup playoffs on one, NBA first round on the other. On the hockey channel some kid caught a puck under the visor, skated to the bench leaving a red trail behind him like he was marking a trail for the rest of the team, took fourteen stitches in the runway, and was out for the power play with a piece of gauze taped to his face. On the basketball channel a sideline reporter was explaining, in the gentle voice you use with a horse, that a 26-year-old All-Star was unavailable due to “right hip tightness” and that the organization would “continue to reevaluate.”
The NHL injury report is the funniest document in American sports. “Upper body.” “Lower body.” That’s the whole document. You watch a man get cross-checked into the boards hard enough that his helmet ends up in Section 112, and the next morning the team announces he’s day-to-day, lower body. The man is being held together with rosary beads and athletic tape and the franchise is calling it lower body.
Coach DiMaggio used to say there were two kinds of hurt — hurt, and injured — and only one of them got you out of practice. He said this while taping his own ankle in the boys’ locker room because the trainer was at a wedding. I thought of him Saturday when that hockey kid came back out for the third period with a face like a beet salad. Coach would’ve been beside himself with joy. He’d have written it down on an index card and pinned it to the bulletin board.
Meanwhile, across the hall, an NBA guy is going to miss tonight’s playoff game with what the league office is now comfortable calling “right knee management.” Not an injury. Management. As if his knee is a small business and the front office is running payroll. He played 58 of 82 games this year, sat the back end of every road trip, did a podcast in March about his sleep habits, and arrived at the postseason approximately as fresh as a bag of pre-cut salad.
I am not naming the guy, because I am not in the business of naming guys, and because honestly there are six of him. The load-management era has produced an entire class of player who treats April like the start of a marathon and February like an optional stretching block. The numbers people will tell you it works. The numbers people will tell you something works right up until the moment it doesn’t, at which point they’ll explain that the model has been refined.
My buddy Ray called Sunday morning. He’s been watching the Panthers because his nephew has a girlfriend who has a cousin who works in the Sunrise team store — Ray operates entirely through six-degree hockey sourcing — and Ray says there’s a defenseman down there playing on what is almost certainly a broken foot. Team’s calling it a “lower body irritation.” Ray finds this extremely funny. Ray is correct.
I want to be fair here, because I’m old, not stupid. The NBA playoffs have produced some of the best basketball I’ll see all year, and the guys who do play play hard. There’s a kid on the Knicks who looks like a substitute teacher and is averaging 41 minutes a night and seems to be enjoying himself thoroughly. Credit where it’s earned. I’m not coming for the players. I’m coming for whatever consultant convinced an entire league that 82 games is a “regular-season volume problem” instead of a job.
There was a guy I used to know named Petey Corrigan who played beer-league hockey into his fifties. Petey took a puck off the cheekbone in 1994, drove himself to the emergency room, came home with a face like an eggplant, and was at Wednesday’s skate. Somebody asked him why. He said, “Because it’s Wednesday.” That was the entire answer. That was every answer Petey ever gave to anything.
I don’t know what we lost between Petey and the right-hip-management era, but I know it wasn’t fitness, because these kids are in better shape than any of us ever were. I think we lost the part where showing up was the assignment. The part where the calendar made the decision and you respected the decision. The part where Wednesday was Wednesday and you didn’t need a sports scientist from Stanford to explain it to you.
Denise is bringing chili over for Game 5. She heard a recipe on a podcast that uses cocoa powder. I told her Coach DiMaggio would have hated cocoa powder in chili. She said Coach DiMaggio is not invited.