That's interesting. To my mind (bear in mind, I'm not a Nadal fan, but I'm trying to be fair here), playing it is the right thing to do. I do have the general belief that players skip events more often than they should, but I also have two particular reasons in this case:
1) If he really is unable to win a match against anyone on grass, then he's not actually going to compete for further glory on any surface, even clay. That makes this year just a farewell tour. If it's a farewell tour, Wimbledon is one of the main stopping places on a good farewell tour.
2) If he does have the capacity to be competitive again in future, then it's worth thinking about the fact that the grass-court field is pretty open right now, especially if Djokovic is absent. I don't, of course, think it's likely that Nadal would win Wimbledon in Djokovic's absence. But if he still has top-level tennis in him (I think that's an open question), then I don't think it's impossible that he could have a deep run at Wimbledon.
I suppose a very plausible counter-argument to what I just said is that the truth is in between my option 1 and 2. Right now, he's not competitive, but it's not absolutely impossible that with more match play and practice, he could recover a degree of form that might make him competitive on clay but not so much form that he'd be competitive on grass. Thus, he might as well skip grass to avoid injury and so play clay events in the hope of building up to something better later this year or even in 2025. Plausible enough, I suppose.
