I've been giving this some thought because something bothered me about some of the comments. Then I read a comment on another blog site that rang a bell that should have been obvious to me. Westphal made a comment about a player needing to know his own body and being able to tell the difference between an injury you can play through or one you can't. So basicly, Westphal is saying that the decision on the seriousness of a players injury is left up to the player, and not to a doctor.
To these old eye's, that might work with a 32 year old established player with nothing to prove, but I seriously doubt it would work with a 19 or 20 year old player with everything to prove. And in Whiteside's case, a very immature player. Let me think, has a similar incident happened recently? Oh yeah, there was this guy named Evans, that had some sort of foot problem that drug on for the entire season. So I guess that if you have a young player thats not exactly living up to your expectations, and he complains that his knee is bothering him, do you send him to a doctor? Hell no! You send him to Reno!
Maybe I'm off base. But I detect some sort of odor here. I suspect if one went back and looked at past history, we might find other incidents of little attention being paid to injuries that turned out to be far worse than originally thought. But all that aside. I don't think you leave the decision of how bad an injury is, up to the player. Isn't that what doctors are for?
