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00:00 Okay, let's move our focus to Mark Williams, who initially missed the game with a back
00:05 contusion. It felt like it was going to be a day or two. He came back and played, then
00:12 we've not seen him since. Steve Clifford spoke not that long ago saying that he suffered,
00:17 I think, a couple of setbacks during his time and that he's actually further away now than
00:21 he was maybe four, six weeks ago. We've not got any insight into what actually the nature
00:28 of this injury is. All I think we've seen is back contusion. It might have listed at
00:32 one point as a strain, but now it seems to be listed as contusion again. There's a lot
00:37 of mystery around this one, Jeff. I mean, everyone's just kind of now assuming that
00:42 back surgery is going to be the eventual outcome here. And I think a lot of people saying get
00:49 it done now so you can have more ramp up time into training camp. But yeah, what can you
00:53 tell us, if anything, about this Mark Williams injury?
00:57 I'll tell you, this is a weird one for me. I've been following this one pretty closely.
01:02 And you're right, it was kind of back soreness, and then it was a contusion. And then he was
01:06 doubtful for a couple of games and looked like, OK, maybe he would start making progression.
01:11 And then all of a sudden, he was just out. And he's been out for a while. Contusion doesn't
01:14 tell us much. It could be a soft tissue contusion. It can be a bone contusion. With the back,
01:20 one of the big things we focus on is this pain spasm cycle where some underlying issue,
01:26 whether it's a bone injury, a muscle injury, a ligament issue, causes the back to be painful,
01:32 which causes your back to spasm. So the spasm happens, and you can get prolonged inflammation
01:38 in there, which causes it to hurt, which causes more spasm, which causes it to hurt. And you
01:42 just get stuck in this, what we call the pain spasm cycle. And it's hard to be functional
01:47 with the back. It is problematic. And so you've got to break that cycle and then treat the
01:52 underlying cause. So what is causing the pain and spasm cycle? And you can yo-yo in and out
01:56 of it sometimes. You can make progress and you're feeling good, and then it gets irritated again.
02:01 You go back into that cycle, then you got to spend some time breaking that cycle again.
02:04 And then you start treating the injury again and so on and so forth. It can be a pretty vicious
02:08 cycle. So, you know, again, it's hard to tell if this is muscle, bone or anything else because we
02:15 don't really know. We just know this contusion. But, you know, it's not overly surprising to see
02:20 a back issue linger, but to have it call the back contusion and continue to linger
02:25 suggests maybe there's something more going there. But again, I, who knows at this point.
02:31 Yeah. And for especially like seven foot bigs with back issues, I've seen Steve Kerr talk about
02:39 this before that, you know, like people trying to avoid back injury at all costs. I think I might
02:43 have heard JJ Reddick said this on a podcast that like, that is the very last option that you go to
02:49 and that you try to do everything you can to rehab it. One, like, can you confirm, is that kind of
02:55 the culture within the NBA? Is that what you see? And then also, why is that the case, if so?
03:00 So this kind of a blanket statement here with any injury, right? Last thing you want to do
03:04 is surgery. That needs to be the last option because you can't undo that once it's been done,
03:08 right? Like once you go in there for whatever reason, whether it's back, knee, ankle, whatever,
03:12 you can't undo that. And so it needs to be the last resort in terms of approach.
03:19 And part of it is because the back bears so much weight, especially for big guys, right? We're
03:24 talking about a ton of weight, gravity pulling us down through our lower back. And then, oh,
03:32 and by the way, we're going to ask you to jump and we're going to ask you to explode upward a lot.
03:36 And it's just a lot of repetitive motion. And so that's an area that is constantly loaded,
03:41 whether that's, you know, just from walking around, but also the nature of the injury.
03:45 And then we're talking about, okay, you're also on a plane traveling and now you're sitting on
03:49 the bench and probably some uncomfortable chairs and those kinds of things can contribute to,
03:53 you know, the back is a very complex thing, particularly for athletes, which is why it's
04:00 hard to just completely dismiss, oh, he's just got a back contusion. There's probably something
04:03 more going on and hopefully we'll get some more insight down the road. And hopefully it's maybe
04:08 it's positive news, right? Like, okay, we feel like we've gotten this under control and he's
04:11 He's on his way back.