Conservative treatments are recommended (i.e., rest, injections) before considering surgery for adults.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4677941/
And surgery seems effective for most athletes in terms of returning to professional sports, but the average time to follow-up in most studies is 1.5 years. Well beyond optimal for IT.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00167-007-0332-x
Sounds like a dumb GM. There are plenty of 'em.
When talking about professional athletes and their bodies, the best treatment is the right treatment. With normal folk like us, doctors always want to start conservative. But for a career in which it is so short and dependent upon your body, conservative can (and possibly did) make the injury linger/worsen. Can’t really tell an NBA star “ok try this and I’ll seeya in six months and see how you’re doing.”
IT I believe has gone on record to say negative things about how Boston handled his injury (iirc saying he information was withheld from him or something like that). So he’s definitely unhappy about it.
He basically lost a full season and some, and his stock dropped even worse by trying to play than if he just went and had surgery immediately and everyone remembered him as the King in the Fourth and a 29ppg scorer in the top seed in the East.
Instead, he hobbled around the court on two different teams and clearly is not going to be the same player he was in green for the foreseeable future.
I know hindsight is always 20/20, but I don’t see how the conservative approach was the correct one here. Even at 1.5 years of recovery, that gets him back on the court sometme the end of this calendar year.