Hopefully just extreme caution on the part of UNC as well.
From ACC Now:
North Carolina forward Tyler Hansbrough is “extremely doubtful” to play in Saturday’s season opener against Penn, coach Roy Williams said today in a prepared statement.
“We’ve made the decision to hold Tyler Hansbrough out of action a little longer,” Williams said in the statement. “It’s extremely doubtful that he would play against Pennsylvania, and I emphasize extremely doubtful. We will continue to evaluate him and have more information when it becomes available.”
There are two elements to this:
1. Hansbrough has not practiced and Roy tends to not play guys who cannot practice. This is not a punitive thing as much as it is tied to Roy’s belief that practice flows into the next game played. From that you can also assume that Hansbrough might not see the Kentucky game either since the time in between Penn and UK is two days.
2. The medical staff is probably erring on the side of caution, then again I have no idea what the latest MRI, assuming he had another one, showed. Hansbrough’s father, Gene, said the soreness was gone but that does not mean the MRI might still show something is amiss. That being said, my first instinct is to view this as simply being cautious given that UNC should be able to handle Penn and Tyler Zeller looked good enough in the exhibition to at least make up some of the Hansbrough absence. In other words I think Roy and Co would love to get by 2-3 games to make sure Hansbrough is fully healed. There is a good chance they can do that because the last thing you want is this to come up again in five weeks.
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My recollection is that he definitely was having an 2nd MRI yesterday. Last week, his father said that the “sore spot” in his lower leg was gone, but that he probably wouldn’t even play in Hawaii.
From all this it sounds like they are going to do all they can to make sure Hansbrough will be 100% for the rest of the year by giving him proper rest before ACC play. It is probably killing Tyler.
Hopefully this is only a caution. As long as Tyler is getting better I will feel good. Hopefully everyone else is going to step up. We need him by Maui at least the last day of it. My prayers are with him. Go Heels!
Actually, Hansbrough had a bone scan initially. That’s different from an MRI. With a bone scan the patient is injected with some sort of nuclear dye that is given 2 or 3 hours to be absorbed into the bone. Then a device scans the area looking for the material. Results depend on how much or how little of the material is detected.
I know this because I’m scheduled to have a bone scan on my hip Friday and have looked it up on the Internet.
I think an MRI would be the next step if the bone scan detected something.
Nueclear dye? That sounds scary. But Tyler can take it.
uncgirl50,
Nothing scary at all. The radioisotopes that are used MRI (in this case, probably Technetium Tc 99m Medronate, as it is great in bone scans) are given in very low doses and are excreted rapidly. Many times the radiation received is less than what you would absorb getting an x-ray.
As for the “extremely doubtful,” prognosis: I actually find this encouraging. I expected he would just be “out,” so to me this indicates that he is getting better with reasonable speed.
Larry,
I think the MRI came first because with the MRI you are looking more at the tendons and such. That is when they noticed a problem. Then they did the bone scan to see if there were any signs of a fracture. The bone scan obviously can pick up the smallest cracks in the bone.
Actually, MRI is more than capable of diagnosing tibial stress reactions. From what I’ve read, this is the only test Tyler’s had.
For the record, I stand corrected. Going back to the original UNC release I found that the stress reaction was detected by an MRI rather than a bone scan. I don’t know if he had a scan or not.
Larry,
On Oct 30 he had the MRI which showed a stress reaction.
On Oct 31 he had a bone scan to confirm there was no fracture.
Thanks for the confirmation,THF.