Players playing through nagging injuries don't get treated fairly.

This has long been a problem around the NBA I felt, among media members and even in this sub, but it got me especially upset when media members were quick to point out Harden's poor performance in the first round of the playoffs. He talked about how he was playing through a wrist injury on his shooting hand for the last month of the season, a fairly significant injury, and played games 4 and 5 with an ankle injury that could likely be a factor in subsequent series (not discrediting Roberson playing great D also). Sure in the short term people acknowledge these things but, especially in the regular season, I feel they get lost in the grand scheme of things. Harden got that wrist injury in late march yet when talking about the MVP discussion it was all "Harden fell off late and Russ picked up his play." How about one got hurt and the other didn't?

Same thing happened with Lillard earlier this year. He had another surge post all-star break this year to fit the "angry all-star snub lillard" narrative when in reality he posted similar numbers to start the year. He then hurt his ankle and missed games in December but proceeded to play kind of injured through to the all-star break. Blazers played bad and he got blamed for bad performances and no one recognized he was playing hobbled. When he started playing well again, no one correlated it to the fact that he said he finally got healthy at the break (Nurk factored in too).

I partially believe that playing hurt also got romanticized; Jordan had his flu game, Isiah had his sprained ankle game against the Lakers, the list goes on. Those are only single game instances though, adrenaline and killer mentality can only take you so far. These guys are human, I know i'm not a professional athlete but I couldn't imagine playing that many games with defenses keying in on me and an injury on my shooting hand. I think it's even more ridiculous that a lot of old players were applauding Harden for not resting since that's become a major talking point, and still criticized his poor play. It's obviously hard to keep up with these things without reading each team's individual sub but I think it'd be best not to jump to conclusions if a good player has a bad month.

TL;DR Everyone forgets about injuries after the fact and criticize players playing hurt too harshly.