Marcus Smart:
Keith Smith: Marcus Smart was asked if his right hand is sore: “Yeah, it gets like this ever since the picture frame incident. There’s still some glass in there. The doctors said it would cause more issues to take it out, so I still have glass in there. Sometimes I can’t really feel my hand.” 1 day ago – via Twitter KeithSmithNBA
Larry Bird:
“Bird laughs a little bit and holds up his right index finger,” John Papanek recounted in a 1981 Sports Illustrated story. “‘This,’ he says. The finger is shaped much like a boomerang, permanently bent toward his thumb at a 45-degree angle. Two operations have failed to straighten it; he can bend it only halfway to his palm. ‘I didn’t have this in college,’ he says.”
For all of his time on the hardwood, the forward didn’t even sustain the injury playing basketball. Bird bent it trying to field a line drive during a softball game and never straightened the finger again. Despite his eventual NBA success, that fateful finger became a “what-if” about his legendary career.
“How great a baseball player would Mickey Mantle have been if he hadn’t torn up his knee early in his career? One wonders what kind of shooter Bird would be now if he had a straight finger,” Papanek wrote. “‘That’s what Red [Auerbach] was telling me when I was trying to sign,’ Bird says.”
Neither lived up to their full potential as a shooter largely due to an off-court injury, haha. In fairness to Marcus' stupidity, Larry was equally stupid, reinjuring that finger in the 1985 playoffs during a bar fight.