The Colts Are Afraid Of Andrew Luck's Leg Pulling A Kevin Durant

Colts quarterback Andrew Luck has already been through several circles of injury hell, and lost roughly a jillion years of his career to a devastating shoulder injury. Right now he’s recovering from a little old calf injury suffered during the spring, but after joining the rest of the world in watching Kevin Durant’s calf injury become a career-altering ruptured Achilles tendon, the Colts are taking no chances.

Durant suffered a relatively alarming non-contact leg injury on May 9, during Game 5 of the second-round playoff series between his Golden State Warriors and the Houston Rockets. It looked like an Achilles injury, but apparently the injury was to his calf, and Durant was cleared to return to the floor nine games later, for Game 5 of the NBA Finals. That went to shit roughly 14 minutes after opening tip, when Durant’s Achilles finally went kerblooey, knocking him out for all of next season and probably changing the trajectory of his career. Colts head coach Frank Reich was apparently paying attention to all that, and this week told Mike Wells of ESPN that it absolutely informs the way the team will handle Luck:

“I was certainly thinking [about] it,” Reich said after the team’s first training camp practice Thursday. “I didn’t have that conversation with [general manager] Chris [Ballard] or any of our trainers. But that’s this business. When you see something like that happen, you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s why you do what we’re doing.’ It was kind of like unspoken truth. That’s why we’re being cautious.”

So the Colts are taking it slow with Luck in training camp. He reportedly took part in individual drills at the start of practice Thursday, and then spent the remainder of the session watching from the sideline. Considering how foolishly the team handled his shoulder injury in 2015, this seems like a step in the right direction.