I refer you to my
Post #633:
Unless you're calling Durant and Westbrook "Mr. Glass" as well, there's not a meaningful difference between them and Davis in terms of ability to stay on the court.
That's a little disingenuous no? Over the course of the last 6.5 seasons (which is the length of Davis' career, I'm not sure why we'd stop at 5.5), Davis has played 450 games and Durant has played 448 games. The difference is that Davis, from what I can tell, has never really suffered a serious injury. In 2014-15, Durant only played 27 games, while undergoing multiple surgeries before he was finally shut down and he seems to get days off for maintenance like most of the other stars in the league that are playing for teams that have playoff spots locked up before the season starts. This is the list of injuries suffered by AD from the article linked upthread:
That only gets you to January, 2017. He went on to miss another 5 games that year, 7 last year, and he's up to 14 this year, and none of the "injuries" that resulted in missed playing time were serious during that period as far as I can tell.
I suppose one could look at the fact that Davis hasn't suffered any serious injuries as a good sign, or alternatively, you can look at it as a guy who just chooses not to play through pain very often. There was the "knee injury" at the end of the 15/16 season in which they shut him down once they were out of the playoff chase which could be considered serious, but Anthony Davis shuts it down quite a bit. In fact, except for the 2 seasons in which the Pelicans made the playoffs, Anthony Davis has never played in the last 2 games of any season. Mostly, he skips those games, sometimes he'll skip just 2, sometimes it's 4 or 5, but besides 15/16 when it was 14 games, it doesn't appear he's shutting it down due to injury. He just doesn't seem to play once the games are meaningless. This is what he said about the end of the 15/16 season:
When the decision was made March 20 to shut down Davis for the rest of the season, the Pelicans were 25-43, with their realistic postseason hopes extinguished. New Orleans was within four games of eighth-place Houston weeks earlier, but lost a back-breaking game at the Rockets on March 2, falling five games back in the standings.
“My knee was definitely killing me, but I knew what we were playing for,” Davis said of playing through discomfort during the playoff chase. “I just wanted to play the game of basketball. When you have so much love for the game, there is not a lot that can stop you from (playing). (But) it was one of those things where it just kept lingering and getting worse as I played. So I had to make a smart decision for not just myself, but the team, and our (future) that we want to build here. I did not want this to become something drastic, when it can be fixed early. I was just trying to think about our future, not just from an individual standpoint, but also the team.”
For me personally, I don't think I would let any of this affect my decision about whether or not to trade for him, except to say that I'm even more adamant that Danny should not trade for him unless he agrees to an extension, because I wouldn't want to give up all of my assets for a guy who very well could miss the end of the one year we have him (just like Kyrie missed the playoffs last year in the 1st year we had him). That would be the worst case scenario. Danny gives up all of the assets, AD doesn't sign an extension, and then he gets "hurt" and/or doesn't want to diminish his free agency value, and we don't even have him for the stretch run in the one "go for it now" season we have him?