The New Orleans Pelicans' medical staff

[N.O.Bronco]

Just shooting off the cuff because as others have said, we have very little details coming from the organization to make more informed opinions, but I can't imagine that the medical staff is just a bunch of buffoons. I do however think like anything, it would probably be to the teams advantage to give our current staff more tools to make better decisions.

Ive made a thread on it before but I would love to see the Pelicans embrace the sort of injury analytics that the Warriors have used. The sort of cutting edge rehabilitation programs Milwaukee have embraced. Taking a long hard look at the Phoenix infrastructure and trying to replicate it. Giving our doctors and training staff more quality insight and data about our players bodies can only be beneficial.

If for nothing else it is added insurance to help keep your 140 million dollar investment possibly a little bit healthier and little bit happier.

[MichaelMcNamara]

Just to play devils advocate, the Warriors "cutting edge analytics" had pretty poor results (for those looking at only results) every season until last year. There was an article on it but I am on my phone and don't feel like looking. Point is, that the Pelicans have spent a lot of time looking into numerous things but there is no fool proof recipe and we can't see behind the curtain. When all you have to analyze is results and no process, it is hard to ever have a real conversation

[Tomdda]

I have tried, and will keep trying, to get this info.

Much of what is germane is very private... The details of injuries. Not all breaks are the same.

Nevertheless, we try.

I should've known before I asked that BSS had made an effort to get more info on this topic, and I appreciate the efforts y'all make to get, write and publish the articles that y'all do. My experience as a Pels' fan would not be near as fun as it has been without the interaction I've had with BSS writers thru Twitter and going to watch parties, etc.

[42]

I should've known before I asked that BSS had made an effort to get more info on this topic, and I appreciate the efforts y'all make to get, write and publish the articles that y'all do. My experience as a Pels' fan would not be near as fun as it has been without the interaction I've had with BSS writers thru Twitter and going to watch parties, etc.

Nah, you keep on asking. Asking publicly reinforces the need, man. We take that seriously, and it actually does give the (award-winning) staff some weight to the requests.

Honestly, BSS is the best place to deal with such a deep issue, and I think they know that.

[Jabberwalker]

In an interview with Amin a few years back I recall him saying that the Suns would work with their training staff when looking at acquiring players. Its a great way to get a competitive advantage over other teams. You could bring in players with lower value if you knew you could fix them. Amin said that the trainers looked at Shaq and Grant Hill, examined their gait, and were able to almost instantly say what was wrong with the player and if it was fixable. Remember when Amar'e was a free agent and Phoenix didn't pay the max for him? He had one great year and then succumbed to injuries that he never recovered from. Do you think that the staff may have been in on that decision? His knee was a known issue.

But this entire topic is causation vs correlation. If Steve Nash went down for a season do we look at them the same way even though the medical staff would have done all the same things? We'll never know, but what we know is that the Suns valued their training staff, relied on them, and you can probably assume believed that they had the best training staff for a while.

Our training staff could be better than that Suns staff but all we see is the results, none of us know the practices. All we see is that we have had more injuries and for what the diagnosis are, it seems like the players recover slower (besides WolveReke and that hand injury to AD that he returned from quicker than we originally thought). That doesn't mean that our staff is worse than any others. As Jason pointed out, we acquired Eric Gordon. That was during the peak of those Suns training staff days. They certainly believed he was fixable and offered him a max contract. Yet he fell apart. We acquired Jrue Holiday, there was clearly something strange that happened there with the 76ers that we'll never know the details of. Then he didn't take the correct course to heal, ignoring the doctors' orders (if I am interpreting that strange situation correctly). Ryno's injury last year was about as freak of an injury as you could get with a wild Gerald Wallace running into him.

There is no way for us to say how good our training staff is, but we can see the results which are a mixed bag and finding any definitive answer is a fools game because all you can go off of is the results. But we being results instead of process oriented is a slippery slope. At some point though, you'd have to say "whatever it is you're doing doesn't appear to be working" but I don't know where you decide to draw that line.

[Schmide234]

Just to play devils advocate, the Warriors "cutting edge analytics" had pretty poor results (for those looking at only results) every season until last year. There was an article on it but I am on my phone and don't feel like looking. Point is, that the Pelicans have spent a lot of time looking into numerous things but there is no fool proof recipe and we can't see behind the curtain. When all you have to analyze is results and no process, it is hard to ever have a real conversation

Didn't some of their more advanced medical analytics just start this year? Seems to have an effect on health, or at least the GSWs think so.

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