Patrick McCaw has missed four of the Raptors‘ six games so far this season due to a nagging left knee issue, and is scheduled to see a specialist today to attempt to determine the source of that issue, as Blake Murphy of The Athletic tweets. Head coach Nick Nurse told reporters that for now McCaw has been ruled out indefinitely.
McCaw, 24, joined the Raptors as a free agent halfway through the 2018/19 season and finished the season with the club, winning his third consecutive NBA championship after two years with the Warriors. Although his regular-season numbers in Toronto (2.7 PPG and 1.7 RPG in 13.2 MPG) certainly didn’t jump off the page, the former second-round pick played some postseason minutes during the team’s championship run and then re-signed on a two-year, $8MM deal.
In the two games he has played so far this year, McCaw averaged 20.0 minutes per contest, showing that he’ll be one of the first players off the bench for the Raptors when he’s healthy. However, it sounds like he may be sidelined for the foreseeable future, depending on how his knee injury is diagnosed.
While we wait for a more concrete timeline on McCaw’s recovery, the Raptors likely plan to lean a little more heavily on reserves like Matt Thomas and Terence Davis, with Stanley Johnson and Rondae Hollis-Jefferson potentially getting a shot as well.