When will Brand be back

As I said in the long comment on the other post, the only thing Brand likes better than working hard to be a great basketball player, is playing basketball.  I think he should be back pretty quickly.

Another thing:  Mike Smith was talking during the Memphis telecast about how he can't think of anyone who has come back from an achilles injury in less than a year.  He was shocked that Brand might be back in 7 months.  We covered all this before the season started:  there aren't a lot of precedents because guys usually suffer the injury DURING the season.  No one has had the injury during the season and come back the same season, and no one ever will.  Brand's injury occurred two months before the season started.  Secondly, there's the question of whether it's faster to have the surgery, rather than waiting for a partially torn tendon to heal on its own.

And finally, I half-believe that waiting until January 25th for Brand to have his first 08 exam might be a bit of ATS (Advanced Tanking Strategy).  If the Clips had managed to hold the fort through December and were still in contention on January 1st, my guess is that the exam to possibly clear him to resume basketball activities might have taken place at least two weeks earlier.  I don't remember when his previous exam was, where he got to start using the special elliptical machine:  my guess is mid-December.  The idea would be to keep him on that for six weeks.  I think the team knows that when Brand is cleared to do something, he's going to go all out.  Now that he's able to do basketball activities, he's going to back in the lineup sooner, rather than later.  So the only way to hold him back was to delay the exam, enabling the team to lose a bunch of extra games in the process.  Just a theory.  In truth, since early in the season Brand has been on a timetable to return at the all-star break, and it looks like that's how it's going to play out.