After a 64-win Cleveland Cavaliers regular season, injuries to roughly half their core rotation (along with a cold-blooded Tyrese Haliburton game-winning shot) have already put Cleveland’s entire year on the brink. After five months of brilliance, it’s the worst kind of luck with the worst possible timing. Sports can be so cruel.
According to ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, All-Star point guard Darius Garland is the one who is particularly hanging the Cavaliers out to dry as he nurses a sprained toe.
In a Wednesday rant on First Take, Smith called out Garland for not playing through his injury as the Cavaliers’ season slowly spins down the drain. Cleveland is already down 0-2 in its second-round series to the Indiana Pacers, with the matchup shifting to Indianapolis on Friday night.
I can’t even begin to explain how unfair and gross this is. Even from a glorified hot-take artist who has clearly lost the plot beyond any inflammatory sports water cooler conversation.
This entire diatribe is so unnecessary:
Criticizing someone’s pain threshold, especially that of a high-level athlete, is a line no one talking about sports should ever cross.
Do some NBA players play through injuries, especially during the playoffs? Absolutely. But no one asks them to. That decision is almost always left to the player. And is every injury the same? No. Does everyone have the same pain tolerance? Also no.
Garland is an elite floor general with a sprained big toe, something that is so fundamental to a human being’s balance and coordination in everyday life, let alone within the confines of an NBA playoff environment. There’s a good chance he’d actually be quite ineffective, maybe even a downright liability, if he tried to play on it. Then, of course, loudmouth charlatans like Smith would quickly pivot to criticizing Garland for not letting someone else on Cleveland’s roster get a shot to play while he’s laboring.
But, most importantly, we don’t know how serious Garland’s toe injury really is. And, we don’t know how it would affect him if he tried to play. All we do know is that the injury is serious enough for the Cavaliers themselves to hold Garland out of their last four postseason games (and counting?). We should only operate off of what we do know before we start criticizing players for not leaving it all out on the floor.
This was a tasteless critique about Garland from Smith with the aim of getting eyeballs on him (and articles like this written). But I suppose that’s nothing new. We should still call a spade a spade.