Los Angeles Lakers: Anthony Davis is answering every question in the NBA Finals

Is Anthony Davis tough enough?

Toughness has been a big question mark for Davis in his career. He’s never played a full season, topping out at 75 games twice but usually ending up somewhere in the mid-60s on average. Last season with New Orleans, he played just 56 games, but that had plenty to do with the fact that he wanted out of Dodge.

He doesn’t usually suffer catastrophic injuries causing him to miss large portions of time, it’s more a matter of plenty of minor injuries that cause him to miss a game here, a game there, a second-half here or there. It’s fine to be hurt and in a sport like basketball, it’s a virtual inevitability, but there were valid questions about whether he’d be able to play through a full season.

Especially a full season involving plenty of high-leverage games like a team with the playoff aspirations the Lakers have.

Clearly, Anthony Davis will never be some kind of Cal Ripken Jr.-esque ironman playing 36 minutes per game, 82 games per season, but he showed this season that when it really matters, he doesn’t have the glass jaw that most people believed him to have.

Whether it was a matter of a frequently incompetent medical staff (in his early Pelicans days) or whether he often made the business decision that playing hurt for a team going nowhere wasn’t worth it, he’s displayed some toughness and staying power that we haven’t seen before this season.

Davis played 62 regular season games of a possible 71, and that would average out to a 71.6 game pace in a normal 82-game season. He played 34.4 minutes per game, and if not for plenty of blowout wins, that average could have been higher. Most importantly, he’s played all 17 games in the playoffs, averaging 36.3 minutes per game.

He’s no Lou Gherig, but he can play tough when his team needs him most.