There has been plenty of hand-wringing about the circumstances surrounding Derrick Rose's ACL injury in the first round of the 2012 NBA Playoffs, but is it right to point the finger at Chicago Bulls head coach Tom Thibodeau? He has pushed Rose and Luol Deng particularly hard over the past two seasons, and as Rose crumpled to the floor in the late portion of the team's win over the Philadelphia 76ers on Saturday, plenty of people wanted to pin the injury on Thibs in this condensed season. In actuality Rose has spread his 40 total games out over four months in the 2011-12 season due to a wide variety of injuries, but Kurt Helin of NBC's ProBasketballTalk blog took the analysis a bit deeper to debunk the idea that Rose was done in by Thibodeau.
Helin posted a quote from Dr. David Altchek from the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, who stated that ACL tears are not an overuse injuries: "There is no evidence that wear and tear, or that kind of issue, playing too much, really has any correlation with ACL injuries in any sport that we've ever studied." As for the idea that the compressed season did Rose in, Altchek (a consultant for the NBA) added that he thinks players are less likely to tear an ACL when tired because they make less explosive moves.
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