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Tag: Star player

  • Clippers subjected Kawhi Leonard to ‘unsafe and illegal treatment,’ ex-trainer says

    Clippers subjected Kawhi Leonard to ‘unsafe and illegal treatment,’ ex-trainer says

    Kawhi Leonard’s tenure with the Clippers has been marred by numerous injuries, and his status for this season remains in doubt.

    As the organization plays its opening season in the newly completed Intuit Dome, a new complication has arisen: A lawsuit filed Thursday by a former trainer alleges unsafe treatment of the franchise’s star player.

    Randy Shelton was the strength and conditioning coach at San Diego State and worked closely with Leonard during the player’s time with the Aztecs. The lawsuit says the Clippers began their pursuit of Leonard — using Shelton as an intermediary — in 2017, two years before Leonard joined the team.

    Following a devastating ankle injury for Leonard during the Western Conference finals in 2016, Clippers assistant general manager Mark Hughes emphasized discretion as he sought out the San Antonio Spurs star’s private health information through Shelton, the lawsuit states.

    Hughes and Shelton spoke around 15 times by phone and seven times in person, Shelton says. The offer: a job as the Clippers’ strength and conditioning coach if the team could persuade Leonard to join.

    The team got its wish, with Leonard and Shelton joining in the 2019 offseason. From there, Shelton was relegated to the sidelines as a new assistant coach, Todd Wright, took over his responsibilities, the lawsuit says.

    Shelton’s remaining job was to take care of Leonard, a task that the suit claims deliberately was made more difficult as the team excluded Shelton from meetings and “withheld necessary medical treatment and information that impacted Leonard’s training and health.”

    Leonard’s health woes continued. He suffered a torn anterior cruciate ligament in the 2021 playoffs, and Shelton set a recovery target of two years — a timetable the Clippers were unwilling to accept, he says.

    Upon Leonard’s return for the 2022-23 season, the team promised a minutes restriction and that the forward would not play back-to-back games but failed to uphold that promise, Shelton claims. After the first two games, Leonard complained of knee swelling and inflammation, and an MRI revealed cartilage damage.

    The lawsuit says Leonard was “given biologics to band-aid the problem” instead of allowing the player the necessary time to heal. Less than a month later, in November 2022, Leonard returned to play and suffered two ruptured ligaments in his ankle within a week.

    Again, Shelton claims, the team demanded productivity, circumventing Shelton’s advice and withholding information from him. Shelton says the team began to force him out shortly thereafter.

    As Leonard battled through these injuries and the team’s record suffered, his minutes per game increased from 32 in December 2022 to 35 in January and 38 in February.

    This heavier load, which included one set of back-to-back games in March and April 2023, helped lead the team to a playoff berth. In the first round against Phoenix, Leonard tore his meniscus and suffered cartilage damage on his repaired ACL, requiring another surgery.

    After the injury, Shelton complained to the team. He said, according to the lawsuit, that “the mishandling of Kawhi Leonard’s injury and return-to-play protocol has been mind-blowing,” and that “the disregard for his recovery process is unacceptable.”

    The Clippers conducted an internal investigation, which concluded in June 2023 and found no wrongdoing. In July, President Lawrence Frank fired Shelton without cause, according to Shelton.

    Last season, Leonard again suffered a breakdown that necessitated another surgery. Shelton blames the team for pushing Leonard too hard.

    “The Clippers place revenue and winning above all else, even the health and safety of their ‘franchise’ player in Leonard,” the lawsuit says.

    Leonard missed the Olympics and is out to start the season. His return date is unclear.

    The Clippers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

    In a statement provided to Chris Haynes, the NBA reporter who first reported on the lawsuit, the Clippers said: “Mr. Shelton’s claims were investigated and found to be without merit. We honored Mr. Shelton’s employment contract and paid him in full. This lawsuit is a belated attempt to shake down the Clippers based on accusations that Mr. Shelton should know are false.”

    Terry Castleman

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  • Why Can’t I Stop Rooting for a God-Awful Basketball Team?

    Why Can’t I Stop Rooting for a God-Awful Basketball Team?

    When I attended a Washington Wizards open practice at D.C.’s Capital One Arena earlier this month, the focus was more on spectator entertainment than Rocky-style workouts. The season opener was a week away, and the players ran drills at half speed and engaged in silly skills competitions for fans, including a basketball version of Connect Four. But as a lifelong Wiz devotee, I was having an awestruck, love-you-man moment. Here I was posing for a photo with Phil freakin Chenier. Franchise royalty. My childhood idol. Back in the 1970s, when Chenier was draining jumpers and sporting a Richard Pryor mustache, the team routinely chased titles. These days? Not so much.

    Being an NBA fan who loves the Wizards is a little like being a foodie who adores turnips: It just doesn’t make sense. Since the 2000–01 season, only the Knicks and Timberwolves have lost more games. The franchise last advanced beyond the second round of the playoffs in 1979 (back when they were called the Bullets), and they’ve missed the playoffs 16 of the past 25 years. We fans have endured 40-plus years of frustration and disappointment, mainly from the typical issues—bad defense, bad draft picks, bad trades—but sometimes from … weirder ones: One All-Star player was charged with a gun felony involving a teammate, and another was once suspended without pay for being overweight. It’s all #SoWizards, to use a Twitter hashtag.

    And yet, I made it out to the open practice with a few hundred fans on a Tuesday night, wearing a Wizards T-shirt and feeling the faint, irrational warmth of preseason hope. Anyone can root for a winner. That’s easy. Last season, the NFL teams with the top-selling merchandise were the Cowboys, 49ers, Patriots, Steelers, and Chiefs. Each team finished with a winning record. In Philadelphia, the currently undefeated Eagles and the World Series–bound Phillies have generated a 20 percent or more increase in business for local restaurants, sports bars, and memorabilia stores.

    But rooting for the middling Wizards takes guts at best and is downright masochism at worst. Still, even though the team is more likely to bring me agony than elation, I can’t fathom supporting any other franchise. The same is surely true of my fellow Wizards fans—and many fans of other perennial losers (hey, the Detroit Lions somehow still have fans). So why do we stay hooked?

    My Wizards fandom began in the D.C. suburbs in the ’70s, when I was a Bullets-crazed kid devouring box scores on the sports page, shooting jumpers on a backyard dirt court, and pretending to be Chenier. I was 12 when the Bullets paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue to celebrate their only title, and the subsequent 44 years have brought lots of bad memories: Last season, the Wizards somehow blew a 35-point lead against the L.A. Clippers. The worst part? I wasn’t surprised.

    Recent pain should feel stronger than childhood joy, I would think—even for fans like me, whose support was passed down geographically. But these deep, die-hard roots can influence our adult behavior. “Early learning is incredibly powerful and hard to erase,” Chris Crandall, a psychology professor at the University of Kansas who has studied fan allegiance, told me. The team’s success 50 years ago may have boosted my childhood loyalty, Crandall explained, and their subsequent failures did not remove it. A new attitude (“Wow, these guys stink”) essentially “lays over the old one, but the old one is still there,” Crandall said. “And it’s very difficult to get rid of it.”

    I’m at least old enough to remember the team’s lone championship. The top memory for Wizards fans in their 30s is probably John Wall’s dramatic game-winning three-pointer in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference semifinals. The Wizards, of course, then lost Game 7. But one reason fans stick around is the perverse pride they have in their fandom, Edward Hirt, a professor at the University of Indiana who has studied sports-fan psychology, told me. Rooting for the Lakers or the Dallas Cowboys is like wearing khakis: You hardly stand out in a crowd. Loving the Wizards gives me a defiant sense of individuality. “Do you want to be like everybody else, or do you want to be different?” Hirt said. “The answer is neither. We want to be a little bit of both. We like feeling like we belong, but we don’t want to be seen as a clone of everybody else, either.”

    Supporting a loser satisfies both of those desires. I can commune with fellow fans at a sports bar or game, but when I walk through an airport, even in D.C., I’m often the only guy wearing a Wizards cap. And honestly, I like that. My Wiz fandom, Andrew Billings, a sports-media professor at the University of Alabama, told me, sends a message to the world: “How loyal am I? I root for the Washington Wizards.” (Which, let’s be real, would be a great T-shirt). In a 2015 study of students from seven universities, football fans were 55 percent less likely to wear team apparel following a defeat compared with a win. But those who do are making a statement: I’m not a fair-weather fan; I’m dedicated and trustworthy.

    Those noble qualities explain why fans of lousy teams despise fair-weather fans, Hirt added. Bandwagon fans skip the suffering but embrace the glory. If the Wizards somehow reached the NBA Finals this year, I’d be both thrilled and infuriated by the mobs of rapturous fans at downtown watch parties. Where were these bandwagon yahoos in 2001, when the team finished 19–63?

    But maybe winning matters less than we think—even for die-hard fans who react to each loss with a primal scream. In one 2019 study, fans of a college football team felt a two-day rise in self-esteem after a victory. But self-esteem levels didn’t drop significantly among losing fans. One of the reasons: Even if your team loses, you can raise your self-esteem simply by commiserating with friends, Billings, a co-author, said.

    Yes, suffering sucks, but suffering together has some upsides. It can be a social glue that intensifies bonds with the team and fellow fans. “Going through this hardship with your sports team makes you much more likely to stick with them,” Omri Gillath, a psychology professor at the University of Kansas, told me. Fans don’t just bask in reflected glory, or BIRG, as psychologists call it; they also BIRF—bask in reflected failure. “It’s about having a community of people that understand you and like the same thing that you do,” Gillath said.

    Last season, a friend and I attended the Wizards’ home finale, and they got shellacked by the equally lousy Knicks. But my friend and I enjoyed laughs over pregame beers. We made sarcastic comments as the Wiz turned a 10–0 lead into a 22-point deficit. I bought an end-of-the-season discounted T-shirt at the team store. Listening to Knicks fans hoot about their victory was annoying, but we had fun. And we bonded.

    But rooting for a losing team may be a dying phenomenon. Sports betting and streaming have made sports more solitary and less tied to where you live—undercutting some of the reasons fans endure their god-awful teams. “Geographic loyalty is particularly powerful for older generations, partly because they weren’t nearly as mobile with their jobs or their careers as younger people are,” Billings said. “I live in Alabama. If I wanted to be a Golden State Warriors fan, I could access all 82 of their regular-season games in a way that was not possible for older generations when they built their fandom.” Younger fans may also be more likely to follow a single player than a particular team, Billings believes.

    Let’s be clear: Winning is way better than losing. A 2013 study found that on the Monday after NFL games, fans of losing teams were more likely to consume saturated fats and sugars compared with fans of winning teams. But I truly believe—and maybe this is loser talk—that my decades of Wizards fandom have made me a better human. I have well-developed coping skills. My friends and I are like Statler and Waldorf, the crusty hecklers on The Muppet Show: We manage head-smacking losses with well-timed quips. I don’t get too elated after a victory—although victories mean more when they’re rare—or too down after a defeat. Hell, maybe it’s even made me more empathetic to people’s challenges. After all, most of us in life can relate more like the constantly struggling Wizards than the trophy-hoisting Warriors.

    Even though I know better, I’m optimistic this season won’t be a #SoWizards year. Maybe the team will jell. Maybe the young players will develop. Maybe the veterans will stay healthy. Or, you know, maybe not. A struggling sports franchise, I’ve decided, is like your idiot brother or jackass uncle. Despite all their obvious flaws, you still love them. And so I’ll cherish disco-era Bullets memories, celebrate the unexpected victories, cling to foolish hope, and brace myself for the worst. If they miss the playoffs—again—well, there’s always next year.

    Ken Budd

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