When Dr. David Schmidt went into Tim Duncan’s left knee in the spring of 2000, he was unsure what he might find. Duncan had torn his lateral meniscus, and that specific injury is scary.

Schmidt would rather see almost anything these days, even an ACL tear. Repair to a medial meniscus, by comparison, generally produces far better outcomes.

But the kind of tear also mattered. And shortly after Schmidt saw what was inside of Duncan’s knee, he was relieved. This was mild compared to what it could have been. Schmidt was able to save a good portion of Duncan’s meniscus.

What followed confirms as much. Duncan has played another 15 years after the surgery, winning both MVP and championship trophies. The Spurs’ medical team has been able to manage him with the latest innovations, and Gregg Popovich has been able to cut down on the mileage by rationing his minutes.

Watching not far away, both marveling at Duncan and wondering what could have been, is someone with his own knee story.

Do you think your career would have gone differently if you had played in this era?

“Oh, yeah,” James Silas said loudly.

Silas laughed last week as he said it. He says he’s been blessed. Silas had a 10-year pro career, and anyone who enters the AT&T Center can see his legacy. His No. 13 is the first number the Spurs retired.

Silas now lives in Austin where he works with at-risk kids. Life is good. He went to Germany this month to see his son play professional basketball.

Still … what if?

Silas says he doesn’t think about it much. But there are also days when he can remember everything, where he was, how it happened, how it felt, when his career changed.

It was preseason in 1976. It was also the first game after the ABA had merged with the NBA. Players such as Julius Erving and George Gervin were braced to play in a new league for the first time, and Silas had as much motivation as anyone.

He’d played at a small school, Stephen F. Austin, and had ended up in a small market in San Antonio. Not many understood exactly how good he was.

Hubie Brown, who coached in the ABA before coaching three different NBA teams, understood. “He was not only the best in our league,” Brown said in 1979, “he was one of the two or three best in either league.”

Silas could explode, and he could muscle, and he could do all of this on his schedule. Gervin would take what the other team gave him; Silas would take what he wanted. At the end of games Silas controlled the basketball and the clock. That’s how he earned the nickname “Captain Late.”

So there he was in his first NBA game, in the second quarter, when a Kansas City Kings player named Bill Robinzine dove for a loose ball.

Those who were there remember Robinzine had no chance to save the ball before it went out of bounds. Coupled with the setting, that this was preseason, what followed was senseless and sad and infuriating. Robinzine fell into Silas’s left knee, and with that No. 13 was unlucky. Silas knew immediately something was wrong.

What came next was telling of those times. Silas kept playing.

The next day he couldn’t run, and yet he kept playing through the preseason. The current Spurs franchise sits players when there is the slightest hint of injury. In those days, when surgery wasn’t an optimistic option, they played on and hoped for the best.

So Silas would debut in the NBA with the Spurs, scoring 18 points on opening night to beat the Philadelphia 76ers. But the knee still wasn’t right, and he would appear in only three of the next six games.

Here is what he said 35 years ago: “I would play a game, then rest, then play. But the knee felt like something was holding it, like it was locked.”

Today, with these symptoms, a player wouldn’t see the floor until imaging and tests had answered all medical questions.

A month later Silas had knee surgery, and doctors removed meniscus from the knee. They didn’t snip away the damage to save what was left, as Schmidt did for Duncan. Instead, as was the practice then, they took out all of the meniscus.

His specific problem area was telling, too. Silas hadn’t torn the treacherous lateral meniscus, as Duncan did. Silas had torn his medial.

Silas sat out six weeks, then came back to score 28 points in a win. Again, from Silas, in a story published 35 years ago:

“When I got into the car that night, the knee was so stiff I couldn’t bend it. But I figured that I hadn’t played in a while and the stiffness would go away. The next day it was terrible. I couldn’t walk. I thought, ‘Hey, they took the cartilage out and I’ve been working on it. What’s wrong? Why isn’t it working?’”

After Duncan hurt his knee in the spring of 2000, the Spurs held him out of the playoffs. Here was Silas, in midseason, so stiff he couldn’t bend his leg — yet he was the one trying to determine what should come next.

It was a pattern that continued. Silas would fall in and out, with another surgery, often telling himself he could fix this with the proper mental approach.

As time went on, he adjusted. “I had six more good years,” he said cheerfully last week.

But were you ever the same?

“Prior to me getting hurt, nobody could do anything with me,” he said. “Everything I did after was on a leg and a half.”

The NBA would never see the Silas that Brown knew, and this isn’t an isolated story. Those who tore their ACLs just 20 years ago, for example, were finished. Now they come back whole.

Still, the years haven’t changed the severity of a damaged lateral meniscus. But Duncan keeps going, sometimes resting, sometimes with cutting-edge therapies on his side. And as he plays toward his 40th birthday, remember the contrast in Spurs history.

“Things happen,” Silas said, and his happened too early.

bharvey@express-news.net