Chaplin said:
Those of you whining about Amare right now are crazy. I'm sorry, but there's no other word for it. EVERYONE on the team played like crap. Maybe if you guys ran the team, you'd just bench everyone and save them until next year. How about that?
Amare is the LEAST of our problems in this game. He didn't lose this game for us any more than he won the Nugget game for us. So people just have to settle down. It was a very, very bad game. We're entitled to have one once in a while.
Dude, you're the one who is crazy. For you to completely dismiss the possibility that more rehab might be best for a guy who went through the most serious, scary knee surgery in sports SIX MONTHS AGO might very well be a sign of a psychotic disorder. Everytime somebody says something even questioning Amare's health, you write three posts saying how impossible and insane such an idea is.
Who cares about the game tonight? It's one game. I don't think people are saying that Amare necessarily played worse than other players, but to compare Amare with the rest of the Suns doesn't make any sense, anyway. Amare has played 3 games; the rest of them have played 60. So, you can't say, "Steve Nash looked stiff, and so did Amare, so they're both fine."
Look, you may not want to believe that Amare is progressing less than perfectly. You might be able to say, "Well, the Suns doctors have f*cked up the microfracture progression before, so they have it perfect now." But the rest of us have to deal with the fact that, in reality, there's a possibility that Amare is being a little too zealous in his return.
We all know that Amare has a little bit of that, "Me against the world," mentality. He basically raised his family. We know his history and we know that he has been through a lot tougher things than possibly coming back too early from a knee injury. Sure there's pain, but everybody knew there would be. Maybe he feels like he's just got to put on a stern, stolid face and fight through it, like he's done many times before. He loves the game of basketball, he wants nothing more than too win a championship, and this team might have what it takes. Then, let's talk about the doctors: everybody has a different threshhold for pain. If you ask 10 people with the same ailment how much pain they're in, you're likely to get 10 different answers. One person breaks his fingernail and is running up and down the room screaming explatives, the other guy gets shot in the shoulder and acts like nothing happened. Tell me, what guy do you think Amare is? If his MRI's show up looking good, and his strengthening is going well, then there's not a whole lot more that a doctor can do. At some point, it's up to Amare, and if he says, "I feel good," then what do you expect? It's not like he's lying to the doctors, but pain is subjective.