What was the collective thought here? We were arguing about if Isaiah should get the max or only $20m per.
No matter what the collective thought was, this blog always over values guys that played here. I admit not even I thought he would sink so low as to get the vet minimum, though.
That was all before it was clear that Isaiah ruined his career getting the C's to the conference finals. Had he been healthy this past year he still would have got the $20+ million a year that was being discussed. It's honestly disingenuous to pretend otherwise. Isaiah will probably go down as one of the league's bigger cautionary tales about not putting the team ahead of your own personal interests.
I know this is becoming "conventional wisdom" but do people really think that Isaish would have gotten $20M if he had shut it down 10 games earlier or 20 games earlier? He would still have had surgery after trying to let the hip heal with rest. He has a chronic, degenerative condition, a ticking time bomb shall we say. It went off in the ECF.
The timing of everything sucks for IT but when exactly would have been a good time for him to shut it down?
The point of bogg's comment is "had he been healthy". Not, "if he had shut it down earlier". And suggesting it was all about a chronic condition over-simplifies what happened to Thomas.
Ball-joint impingement is a condition that only becomes a problem if a joint is stressed out of the range that is otherwise not bothered by the impingement. Thomas played for years with hardly a skipped beat, missing very little time. So arguably, his normal style of play was not putting undo stress against the limits of whatever his 'chronic' impingement condition imposed. But unfortunately in his last year here he had first one odd stressor mid-winter, which simply bothered him for a couple of days and then, more seriously, 275 lbs of Karl Anthony Towns landed on top of him with just weeks left in the season.
It was that last event that seemed to really do the damage from which there was no bouncing back.
If that had not happened, who knows? Maybe he continues to just play at his high level right through the next few years?
I'm pretty sure he would have gotten paid fairly well if that had been the case.