That's all well, and to the good. I just want you to acknowledge that there is a cause and effect at play. There's significantly more than a non-zero chance that Malone got our two best players injured, in the name of cultivating a winning mentality.
Well, I'm not really certain what you want from me.
The fact is that the more a player is on the court, the more chances they will have for injury. That's a given.
But every coach has to make a choice in 'risking' their players by playing their best players more minutes. And it's always going to be a case of risk vs. reward, and sometimes you win that equation and sometimes you lose that equation, and there isn't any definitive line that you can draw to say 'This is bad and this is not bad' since injuries by their vary nature can't be predicted.
But given where the organization is at, Malone can't be 'risk'-averse if he wants to get this team headed in the right direction.
No-one knows what the numbers are, so it's impossible to speculate as to what is a good amount of minutes and what isn't, so I can't play the percentage game and say that Rudy was X% more likely to get injured in this game due to the increase of minutes the previous game. What is true, and will always be true is that the % definitely goes up the more time a player spends on the court, but the growth of that % is anyone's guess.