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Maybe it was always like this. After all, Joe Namath once missed 30 out of 56 starts in a four-season stretch between 1970 and ’73. Frank Gifford was a glamorous, unscathed football prince one second, laid flat by Chuck Bednarik the next, sent out of football for a whole year.

Guys are stronger now, and faster, and they do things that were mostly unheard of when I was playing, which wasn’t that long ago,Knicks coach Jeff Hornacek said earlier this season. But once in a while you learn the hard way that they also aren’t invincible.

Hornacek was talking a few days after Gordon Hayward of the Boston Celtics experienced one of the most frightful moments a professional athlete has ever endured, blowing out his ankle on opening night of this season, all of it perfectly captured in high-definition by a dozen television cameras. Hayward had executed that same play a thousand times. 토토 This time, he landed wrong, his ankle in tatters.

In fact, like Williamson, many recent top prospects have suffered injuries early in their careers. Markelle Fultz, Ben Simmons, Joel Embiid, Lonzo Ball, and Jabari Parker, who were all top-3 picks, all struggled with injuries early on in their careers. Some of them had not even turned 20 when they suffered their first major injury.

So, despite sports medicine being more advanced than ever, young basketball players will continue to suffer serious injuries unless parents stop specializing their kids or a change is made in the culture of youth basketball.

However, the culture being created in the youth/AAU basketball community are not helping the NBA set reasonable guidelines for youth basketball. While some parents may decide to not specialize their children early on, more parents will continue to specialize their children with the false assumption that this will help improve their child’s chances of playing basketball at a college or professional level.