Didn't find one study of non-surgical outcome (e.g., rehab, rest).
This is the oddest thing about the situation to me. Why rest when it seems normal to have surgery? Or do those studies only look at guys who ultimately decided on surgery? Do they ignore other players who've had a tear and then recovered without surgery?
We are all flying blind here. But that seems like an answerable question.
The problem with the ESPN article is that the comps it uses are all players who HAD SURGERY.
It doesn't (and for reasons it notes in passing) have any data on players with hip labrum issues who did not need (or at least elected not to have) surgery. Because that information isn't normally public. It's hard for an athlete to hide the fact that he just had surgery. But players rest and recuperate innocuously all the time. And hip issues are often signaled as knee and/or lower back issues so often times players could have publicly described their non-surgery-requiring hip issue as a 'sore knee' or 'sore back'. So players may innocently be 'hiding' his hip issues when he announces he has a knee or back issue instead.
So there simply isn't going to be any useful set of data about non-surgical recovery from hip issues.
It's a wild notion, I guess, but if a player has surgery for an injury, it is usually because it is considered a worse injury than when a player does not undergo surgery. So using those players as 'comps' to anticipate Thomas' future would seem like a pretty poor analysis.
Further, surgery itself, regardless of the injury, imposes trauma that is itself something that has to be recovered from.
I've had to learn a lot about hip issues in recent years due to my own hip injury and one thing I know for certain is that there is a gigantic, wide spectrum of possibilities here and that article only talks about the more serious, worse case part of the spectrum.
Unless someone has access to Thomas' actual medical information, there is simply no way for someone to know how his recovery will proceed. None of the doctors in the article have ever examined Thomas or have had access to his x-ray & MRI scans. But hey, they got to see their names in an ESPN article! And maybe even get called up (paid) for a talking-head panel on TV!
Now, I'm not trying to minimize what the possible worst outcome may be for Thomas. And I'm not going to predict that he'll come 100% back by late November. All I'm saying is that there really is no information presented here or elsewhere that allows us to make any sort of prediction regarding Thomas.
The only information we have that's remotely close to a direct source is the things Thomas himself has said and you'll just have to decide for yourself whether he is honestly repeating what his doctors (who HAVE examined him) have told him. We do know that at a minimum, they did not have consensus that he _should_ have surgery. Because he didn't (At least not yet.). Those are all positives for him.
That said, the implication (by the trade) that Danny was concerned about it and that he's acknowledged he'll miss at least the start of the season are negatives.
We don't really have anything more than that.