Steve Blake punctured his foot on a parking lot spike

Injuries are an everyday reality of high-level professional sport, which means that sooner or later a few of them are going to be really weird. That goes for what happens on court, where sometimes players suffer debilitating knee ligament tears by slipping on a wet spot, but it's especially true off the court. Which is to say that even though the physicality of basketball itself is incredibly demanding on the body, the world sometimes acts like a big jerk and plays a practical joke on a person paid millions for feats of athletic greatness.

Los Angeles Lakers reserve point guard Steve Blake is not an athletic dynamo by any means, but only the meanest fan would term him a slouch — like any professional basketball player, he's within the top one percent of athletes in the general population. However, that natural ability could not save him from a nefarious spike strip in a parking lot. Here's the entirety of the very short statement on Lakers.com:

Lakers guard Steve Blake suffered a puncture wound to his left foot after stepping on a spike strip in a parking lot, it was announced today. Blake will be prohibited from participating in any impact exercises for approximately three weeks.

At this point in the NBA calendar, three weeks is not so bad: Blake will miss part of training camp but should be available for the start of the regular season, thereby saving Lakers fans from having to watch Chris Duhon for extended minutes in meaningful games. On the other hand, Blake probably didn't expect to miss three weeks of time when he first walked around this particular parking lot. Because, you know, it's really hard to get injured in a parking lot.

Complicating this particular incident is the fact that spike strips of this kind are typically located at lot entrances to keep people from leaving without paying. They're also usually angled, so Blake likely would have had to have paid no attention whatsoever to where he was walking. However, Blake's wife Kristin tweeted a cryptic message that people should not judge without knowing the whole story, which brings the entire story into another realm. For all we know, the parking lot attendants were Clippers fans and injured Blake on purpose. Weirder things have happened.

Whatever the real story may be, we wish Blake the best of luck in his recovery. He can also take solace in knowing that his injury is far from the weirdest in major sports history. In my opinion, that honor belongs to former MLB outfielder Glenallen Hill, who once fell through a glass table during a nightmare about a spider attack. By comparison, Blake doesn't look so bad.