A meat grinder of an NBA season

Health and safety?

BY HENRY ABBOTT

We watch the NBA postseason to see the best basketball on the planet. The best players, at their best.

Not this year.

A sign: In Wednesday’s Laker win over the Warriors, one of the world’s best players, Anthony Davis, turned to help up another, his teammate LeBron James, who was lying on his back under the basket. Both Davis and James spent a lot of the year injured. In his pivot to give James a hand, Davis leaned a bit too far. Rather than adjust his foot into LeBron’s delicate ankle, Davis just pitched over, chest to chest, into James. James hugged him in—a Staples superstar sandwich. 

It was a hint. LeBron James has long been both one of the heaviest, fastest, and highest-jumping athletes in the world. His rim attacks are impossible to defend, and a reason why, on Wednesday night, microphones caught his coach saying the Warriors couldn’t stop “the freight train.” LeBron has dunked through contact with authority for 18 NBA years. 

But on Wednesday, Draymond Green did some…