It was the break heard all around the world. When USA basketball player Paul George broke his leg at a nationally televised USA Basketball exhibition, the dramatic nature of the injury caused an uproar and started a big blame game. But many may go back and forth about why it happened, we take a look at how could a break be so gruesome just by playing basketball? We take a cue from Paul Grosso, president of The Centers for Advanced Orthopaedics.
“The injury comes from force against the bone at the wrong angle,” Grosso said. “The worst one of these injuries, open fractures, actually was a woman who was hanging curtains and fell off a 2-foot stepladder.”
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“The biggest worry right away is infection,” Grosso said. “Typically with an open tib-fib fracture, you try to get the person into surgery within eight hours to make sure there’s no infection around the wound.”
The wound needs to be cleared before doctors can insert a rod into the bone to stabilize it. Grosso said that rod usually stays in permanently unless it’s causing pain, locked in with screws.
The bone has to heal before any major rehab can be done, and Grosso said that takes six to 10 weeks typically. But it’s not the important area.
“The bone gets a lot of attention because it’s so obvious, but the thing I’m worried about most is the soft tissue around it,” Grosso said. “These guys are so young and athletic that the bone should heal.”
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Grosso said it’s difficult to put a time frame on the healing process of the muscle without having actually done the operation himself. But though George is expected to be out for the season, that could be sped up or slowed down based on how the muscle heals while the bone is healing and before he can start doing much rehab.
Will he be back to pro-basketball/all star status? Michael Jordan broke his foot in his second NBA season, missing 64 games in 1985-86. His career turned out pretty well.
If we want to get a better sense of the future of Paul George, the Indiana Pacers star who fractured his right leg while scrimmaging with Team USA last week, we need a more comprehensive way of identifying star players who got hurt. I searched our NBA database for players since 1976-77 to whom the following happened:
First, the player had an All-Star-caliber season. I define this as a player worth at least 7.5 wins above replacement (WAR) as based on statistical plus-minus (see more about that statistic here). There are about 25 players who meet this threshold each year in the NBA, about as many as make one of the league All-Star teams.
Then, the next season, he played in 20 or fewer games for reasons having principally to do with his injury.
The average Recovery Rate is just 55 percent, meaning that the typical player was only about half as good after his injury as beforehand. But that paints too pessimistic a picture for George and the Pacers.
The reason is that there’s a correlation between Recovery Rate and age. With some exceptions, the players who returned to have productive careers after their injuries were young at the time they got hurt, while the ones who didn’t were in the middle to late stage of their careers
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