The AltRaps Blog

http://www.thestar.com/Sports/article/277022Alas, the solution isn’t obvious.

The surgery once recommended by the club’s medical staff – the surgery that Garbajosa, acting on advice from the Spanish side of Atlantic, opted against so he could play in September’s European championships in his hometown of Madrid – isn’t an imminent option.

Doctors, after all, are often loath to cut open patients who claim to be bereft of pain and symptom free, as Garbajosa insists he is.

Still, if his game seems more tentative than it did last year, perhaps it’s because his left ankle, when he removed his sneakers the other day, looked to be the size of a small cantaloupe, bloated like the rest of his lower left leg.

And perhaps it’s because he is well aware that his fibula, when last x-rayed around the beginning of training camp, still hadn’t fully healed.

On a practice court in Italy, Bryan Colangelo, the general manager, told reporters that there was, according to doctors, a “99 per cent chance” that the bone would not mend without further surgery.

So his leg’s likely still broken. The infamous $1 million insurance policy that allowed him to play in the European championship is up on Nov. 30.

And after that, since insuring him looks to club insiders like a prohibitively expensive proposition, the team will be on the hook for the approximately $8 million remaining on his contract. And that can’t thrill management.

It’s a mess that begs revisiting his summertime decision. Why was it so important for him to take the court when his country had already won an automatic berth into the 2008 Beijing Games?

You can make an argument that Garbajosa put his NBA career at risk, and went against his team’s vehement wishes, in the name of his ego. He wanted to be a part of a home-soil victory. He wanted to be one of the kings of Madrid for a month. He got at least part of his wish (and a silver medal). Now his career is at a standstill, perhaps as a direct result, and the Raptors are the lesser for it.

If you’re a Raptors fan, it’s hard to embrace him for putting his team’s concerns so far behind his own and his country’s. It’s not that athletic patriotism isn’t fun and stirring and often admirable. But given the circumstances, given his injury, given that the tournament didn’t come with Olympic implications, it was, then and now, difficult to see the wisdom in Garbajosa’s insistence. If you’d like to glimpse the slump-shouldered consequence, keep an eye on the end of the bench tonight.