Hot News: Paul George Injury: Why The Stanchions Were So Close, And How To Fix It.

Paul George's gruesome leg injury - an open tibia-fibula fracture, which George suffered in Friday's Team USA scrimmage - was as devastating as it looked on video.

( Warning: The footage is graphic.)

George underwent surgery on Saturday, and medical reports indicate he will likely miss all of next season to rehabilitate. The injury raises big questions for George's career; a high-level return from an open tibia-fibula fracture is basically unprecedented in the NBA.

What made George's injury especially horrifying: It was seemingly preventable. George caught his leg on the stanchion holding up the hoop at Las Vegas's Thomas & Mack Center, where Team USA held its Friday night scrimmage.

But as the image below shows, the baskets at the Thomas & Mack Center (top photo) were a few feet closer to the court than in a normal NBA arena (bottom photo) - which set up a terrible scenario that led to George jumping to make a play but snapping his leg against the stanchion when he landed.

George 'came down on the hoop standard at speed at just the right angle to do that,' tweeted Rachel Blakeman, an athletic trainer at Stanford. 'Just a few feet back from that base[line], and injury doesn't happen,' she added.

Why was the basket where it was? And how can sports leagues prevent a Paul George-like scenario from ever happening again?

I took my questions to Erik Sigurdson, the founder of COURTSPORTS. The two-decade-old company offers services to design and maintain basketball courts, and Sigurdson has worked for both NBA and NCAA teams.

And he's been musing on this, too.

'After Paul's injury yesterday,' Sigurdson told me, 'I made a comment to my staff that the portable hoops are going to need to be changed to prevent injury.'

Sigurdson explained that there's a key difference between Bankers Life Fieldhouse, where the Indiana Pacers normally play, and a college arena like the Thomas & Mack Center.

According to Sigurdson: All NBA teams must use Spalding's portable basketball system, under a league mandate, which has a set distance from the floor. NCAA teams, however, end up using different portable basketball systems that vary widely in size, manufacturer, and placement.

NCAA arenas also vary widely in how much room they leave between the court and the hoop. For instance, COURTSPORTS worked on a court that only left three feet of space between the out-of-bounds and the front padding of the basketball hoop. (Sigurdson remembers the distance well, because they had to paint the university's name into the space they had available.)

Post By http://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamond/2014/08/02/paul-george-injury-how-one-expert-would-make-sure-it-never-happens-again/