Ultimately, Garnett's injury doesn't REALLY matter. It's just sports. But I find it a little chilling that the best player on the defending NBA champion could be sidelined for two solid months, with something obviously wrong, and nobody came close to unraveling the real story. We still don't know what's wrong with his knee. We just know it's screwed up. And, yeah, you could say that Garnett has always been guarded -- with just a few people in his circle of trust -- and yeah, you could say that only a few members of the Celtics organization know the truth (maybe coach Doc Rivers, GM Danny Ainge, majority owner Wyc Grousbeck, the trainers and that's it). But this was a massive local sports story. Its coverage is not a good sign for the future of sports journalism or newspapers in general.
That is an excellent question and certainly an uncomfortable or unknown answer. How did KG's injury escape investigation. The fact that there's still uncertainty of what he has, how long he'll be out, if surgery is needed, etc on one of THE biggest names in an entire sport seems hard to fathom. Let alone that this has been going on for two months. Within the column Simmons lays the blame at the decline of the local newspaper industry which implicitly notes that ESPN is simply incapable or unwilling to do the hunting for the actual story. This admittedly is something I've discussed before that without the local paper there is less transparency, more reliance on gossip and rumor and more of a superficial stenographic covering of the sport. Perhaps that's over generalizing from this event but its hardly a good sign.
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