Lakers long time trainer Gary Vitti sat down with Mike Trudell and talked about one of the busiest seasons of his career. Ten of the Lakers rotation players missed time due to injuries, and the cumulative total of missed games this year was 176 — meaning a lot of work for Vitti.
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Vitti had time to sit back and reflect on this tumultuous season, and discussed one of the year’s early injuries. Steve Nash went down in the second game of the season with a broken fibula after colliding with the Portland Trailblazers rookie of the year Damien Lillard. For Vitti, it was one of the weirdest injuries he’s come across in his career.
“It was the most fluke lower extremity fracture that I have ever come across. We play 29 other teams, and I asked every single one of the team physicians if they’d seen such a fracture, and not one had seen a proximal medial head fibular fracture like Steve had.”
Nash missed 24 games recovering from the broken fibula, and the Lakers went 12-12 in that time. After getting back on the floor, Nash never seemed to be himself.
Vitti noted that there was a lot of compensation during game play, and compensation usually leads to more injuries, so Nash was essentially behind the curve for the rest of the season in terms of playing in any kind of game shape.
Nash would miss eight more games toward the end of the season with hip and hamstring injuries, which may have been caused by Nash over-compensating while trying not to re-injure his broken fibula.
This off-season, Nash will likely be looking to get back ahead of the curve to be in game shape by the time training camp starts. Nash was a key off-season acquisition during last year’s free-agency period, and will be key to the Lakers having a much more successful season this time around.
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