Mike Celizic

LeBron James sprained an ankle, from the looks of it badly, in the third period of a blowout loss to the Pistons, and immediately some people wanted to know why he was in the game at all.

With five games to play at the time, the Cavaliers were locked into the fourth seed in the Eastern Conference playoffs. Win or lose down the stretch, that wasn’t going to change. So, the thinking goes, it makes no sense for the team to play its MVP candidate, since he could get hurt and destroy the team’s playoff hopes.

The thinking is correct, it could be said, because LeBron did get hurt in a meaningless game. He says he’ll be all right for the playoffs, but if it’s really a bad sprain, he won’t be the same. Such injuries can take longer to fully heal than broken bones.

I don’t buy it. James didn’t get hurt because he was playing when he didn’t need to. He got hurt because he was playing, period. It could have happened two weeks ago or two weeks from now or not at all. Every time he steps on a court, whether to practice or to play, an injury can happen.

If you don’t want him to get hurt, have him ride a stationary bike the rest of the season. Don’t even let him practice. He could get hurt landing wrong, as he did against Detroit. Injuries like that can occur anytime and anyplace. Best to eliminate as many risks as possible. Heck, have someone carry him to his car and to the door of his house. Why not go all the way?

Yeah, I can hear someone protesting, but he got injured in this game — a blowout loss — when he didn’t even need to be playing. If he wasn’t in there, he doesn’t get hurt.

And if I hadn’t left ten minutes late to go to a golf outing last fall, I wouldn’t have hit that deer that leaped into my passenger-side fender.

You can’t live your life that way and you can’t run a team that way. You can’t sit players out for the last five games of a season, not if they’re healthy and can play. They need the work, and the team needs the continuity. You may sit your stars the last day of the year, but that’s as much to make sure they’re rested as to avoid injury. But you don’t sit them for 10 days.

Yes, you’ll have a healthy team — provided someone doesn’t throw out his back putting away groceries — but you’ll also have a team that’s stale and rusty. The more a team plays together, the better it gets. Neither teams nor players improve by taking a week off, not when they’re healthy, and LeBron was healthy.

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