I just happened to look at the stats and I noticed that Trevor Ariza, during his stint with the Wizards so far, is playing 38 minutes per game. That would be good for most minutes per game in the entire league it applied to the whole season; he would be ahead of Harden, Beal, and Davis by a whole minute.
Instead, Ariza is 7th on the MPG leaderboards. That’s still a lot of minutes for a guy who is strictly a role-player and who is strictly 33 years old. Maybe the minutes are easier on him since he doesn’t play as hard as he used to. Maybe he as access to secret ‘roid treatments that minimize the impact on his body. Maybe I’m not giving him enough credit and he’s taken good enough care of his body over the years that these minutes are no problem for him.
This sort of reminds me when Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Marcus Morris were leading the league in minutes for the Pistons. Except those guys were young and their bodies were ready to absorb those minutes. I’m seriously afraid that one day Ariza’s legs are just going to fall off and they’ll have to take him to the hospital to put them back on. Or one day Ariza will just randomly decide that he wants to quit on the Wizards too, and he’ll sit at center court while waiting for coach to take him out.