Lakers News: LA Should Temper Rampant Optimism About Kobe Bryant's Recovery

For a team that could very well head to the lottery due to its own futility for just the third time in history, the levels of dopamine seem unusually high at Los Angeles Lakers facilities.

Everything painted out of the halls of Staples Center is coming in purple and gold roses. There are no fears, no trepidation, no overwhelming sense of melancholy one would expect to come eroding like the stench of month-old coffee. The whole place feels eerily Jim Jonesian considering the unending turmoil that enveloped the 2012-13 season.

Mike D'Antoni will be vastly improved in Year 2. The team will be just fine without Dwight Howard's pouty attitude weighing down the locker room. Kobe Bryant is breaking the land, speed, time and every other record in his recovery from Achilles surgery. 

Of course, the latter point is the one most salient at the moment. Bryant's recovery has become the golden goose of an otherwise hellacious summer, like the sweet smell of bacon as Skyler cooks Walter Jr. his last breakfast before they sit him down and tell him where his new car really came from.

As you all know, Bryant suffered a ruptured Achilles on April 12 against the Golden State Warriors. An injury that comes with almost an undiagnosable absence—anytime something has a quarter-year window, it's best to not take it too seriously—there were an abundance of doomsday theories in late-April.

Could Kobe's career be over? Will this lead to Howard's departure? Can the Lakers franchise survive this blow? The answers to these questions were no, no (at least we don't think this was a contributing factor) and yes—all positive signs for LakerLand.

But it's disconcerting that of late when you hear anyone talk about Bryant's injury, from team brass to the man himself, they make it look like he's coming back from a common ankle sprain. 

While the bluster had been in the ether since the moment he went in for surgery—Kobe + social media = a drove of watermarked photos, apparently—the talk of an earlier-than-expected return has only heightened. Team vice president Jim Buss arguably started off the crazy train by telling NBATV last month that No. 24 could be available before the regular season.

"Well, we're in Vegas, and I would bet a lot of money that this guy comes back probably in preseason," Buss said (h/t ESPN's Arash Markazi). 

The Lakers open the preseason on Oct. 5. In case you didn't break out your Gregorian calendar calculator before clicking on this column, that's less than six months after his injury. While Buss didn't specifically cite the beginning of the preseason, his stance was bemusing.

At least, that was the case until Bryant took hold of the world's biggest can-opener. Twisting his words into such a way as to purposefully send the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen into an uproar, Kobe opened up on his recovery process to say he "shattered" the expected recovery time, per Jonathan Hartzell of NBA.com:

"

The surgical procedure was different […] and because of that the recovery has been different. The normal timetable for recovery from an Achilles, we’ve shattered that. Three-and-a-half months I can already walk just fine, I’m lifting weights with the Achilles just fine and that’s different. So we don’t know what that timetable is going to be. It’s kind of new territory for us all.

"

Remember, Bryant said in June that he'd be looking for a return in November or December. He went on to say this week in the Philippines that his tendon feels "really, really good" and that he has trainers with him following him around the world to expedite this recovery process, per Eric Pincus of the Los Angeles Times. We still have no word on an exact return date, but Bryant's quotes seem far more in line with Buss' insinuation than his initial thoughts. 

These are all good things should they come to pass. But the Lakers and Bryant are playing a dangerous game here. One that could really backfire if he doesn't quite "shatter" the recovery time. 

The history of Achilles injuries suggest that he won't. Bryant's surgical procedure may have been changed from the ones done previously, but we have a ton of anecdotal evidence to suggest he won't just hop back on the court and return to superstar form.

Dr. Douglas Cerynik and Dr. Nirav H. Amin of Drexel University spoke with Deadspin's Kyle Wagner in April about their paper titled "Performance Outcomes after Repair of Complete Achilles Tendon Ruptures in National Basketball Association Players." While unpublished online at the time—you can now purchase the article at the American Journal of Sports Medicine's website—the results of the study were damning.

Of the 18 players who Cerynik and Amin studied from 1988-2011, seven never returned to play. Only eight players continued two seasons or more. The players who managed to return saw both their playing time and effectiveness plummet at a rate so exponential it would send Bryant's PER plummeting to right around 50th in the NBA, assuming 2012-13 rates stick.

The average age of these players who suffered Achilles injuries was 29.7. Bryant turns 35 this month. Not to spoil anyone just learning about human anatomy, but things tend to heal slower and not as well when you're older. 

It's admittedly a small sample of players, but the results are telling. As Wagner astutely points out, many people have used comparisons to former Atlanta Hawks star Dominique Wilkins' successful return post-Achilles injury as a framing device for Bryant. 'Nique had about half as many minutes on his NBA odometer as Bryant.

Kobe even has 20,000 more career minutes than Chauncey Billups, who returned last season after the same injury. Billups ruptured his Achilles on Feb. 7, 2012. He didn't return to the lineup until late-November last season, and subsequently missed 59 games due to a variety of injuries. 

These are the harsh realities of Bryant's future. Billups took more than nine months to recover, still couldn't get his body quite right and saw just about every facet of his game decline in a major way.

Bryant is a better than Billups and has a longer history of defying the Injury Gods, yes. But for him and the Lakers to be selling this overly optimistic tone sets up all parties involved for disappointment. This isn't Robert Griffin III wanting to play in the preseason. We have anecdotal evidence to suggest ACL recovery times are getting lesser by the day; the same cannot be said for Achilles injuries.

That said, it's easy to see why optimism pie is a complimentary dessert at Staples. 

From the team's sense, well, isn't it obvious? Without this golden goose of Bryant's recovery, the Lakers franchise is on the precipice of one of its most lifeless and irrelevant seasons in recent memory.

Howard's departure, like it or not, altered the perception of this franchise for now. No longer are the Lakers seen as this end-all,-be-all bastion of NBA excellence. Howard left because his teammates were old, Bryant was demanding and Mike D'Antoni wasn't the funnest guy to play for. He left because the Lakers did a bad job at being...the Lakers.

While he wasn't the difference-maker anyone expected in Los Angeles, D-12 leaving for Houston only made the onus on Bryant greater.

Forty-year-old Steve Nash, Pau Gasol coming off his worst professional season and Nick "Swaggy P" Young aren't selling tickets. Sorry. Lakers fans are smart enough to know their team's ceiling is limited to a back-half Western Conference seed to begin with; they also know all hell could break loose if Bryant's recovery time proves longer than expected.

Remember, this is a team with a massive television deal with Time Warner. Remember, this is a team that charges $100 just for the privilege to someday maybe possibly become a season-ticket holder. Remember, this is a team with a looming giant playing in its own building. 

The Clippers are legitimate championship contenders. They re-signed their superstar (Chris Paul), brought in the NBA's highest-paid coach (Doc Rivers) and surrounded said superstar with one of the best arrays of outside shooting in the league.

Interior defense is a problem, but you know what isn't? The Lakers. For the first time, the bastard stepchild of Staples Center is preening while the golden child limps into the season like a wounded deer. 

Suffice it to say there are a few (million) reasons the Lakers would want to shed this untenable situation in the best light. And Bryant, of course, is one of the most legendary competitors in league history. His outsize id isn't going to just be satisfied with a full recovery. He has to have the best recovery ever.

All of this is understandable. Should history again prove correct, though, all of this is setting up for the Lakers and Bryant to have egg on their faces.

If there is anything, anything we learned from the Derrick Rose saga last season, it's the fickleness of the common fan. Catcalls for Rose to return to the lineup despite not being ready—whether mentally or physically—were so misguided and shortsighted it was amazing. Here was a man two years removed from being a league MVP, one year removed from leading the East's best regular-season team, being vilified for being injured.

Kobe obviously has more leeway from Lakers fans. But if you don't think if Bryant is still M.I.A. come Christmas that the "where's Kobe?" and the "is he done?" murmurs are coming, I'd like to introduce you to 2013. 

The Lakers and Bryant need to take a step back. Take a middle ground. Keep the frenzy to a minimum. Kobe will be back in the lineup at some point next season, and it'll be a great moment for anyone who enjoys the NBA.

Let's stop putting the unprecedented label on things and allow modern science to do its job.

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