After being held out of his team’s game against Brooklyn on Thursday due to the league’s health and safety protocols, Lakers point guard Dennis Schröder was not at practice Friday and it’s “uncertain” if he will be available against Miami on Saturday, per head coach Frank Vogel (Twitter link via Dave McMenamin of ESPN). “There’s no timeline,” Vogel said.
The Lakers started Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Wesley Matthews in the backcourt with Schröder sidelined.
After initially being ruled out at least two or three weeks when he was diagnosed with a right calf strain on Monday, Lakers star Anthony Davis was reevaluated by team doctors on Thursday and has a new recovery timeline, head coach Frank Vogel told reporters last night.
According to Dave McMenamin of ESPN, the Lakers expect that Davis will miss approximately the next four weeks. That estimate includes the time it would take him to ramp up his conditioning once he’s healthy enough to resume workouts.
“We want to try to put this fully behind him and be conservative with it, just to make sure that it’s fully healed before he’s back,” Vogel said of Davis, who has also experienced Achilles tendinosis in his right leg.
The updated timeline ensures that Davis will remain out for the Lakers’ last seven first-half games and won’t be back on the court until at least a week into the second half, which gets underway on March 10. It will also sideline him for the March 7 All-Star Game, opening the door for another Western Conference player to replace him on the roster if he’s named a reserve, which is likely.
The Lakers figure to lean more heavily on the likes of Kyle Kuzma, Montrezl Harrell, and Marc Gasol during Davis’ absence.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles also had to deal with a hole in its backcourt on Thursday night vs. Brooklyn, as Dennis Schröder was out due to the NBA’s health and safety protocols. Vogel said after the game that he’s not yet sure how much time Schröder will miss as a result of those COVID-19 protocols, per McMenamin (Twitter link).
There have been some instances of players receiving clearance within a day or two if they returned a false positive or inconclusive coronavirus test, or if they were subject to a contact tracing investigation and were determined not to have been a close contact of someone who tested positive for the virus.
However, if the player is determined to have been a close contact of someone who tested positive, he’s generally sidelined for at least a week. If the player registers a confirmed positive test himself, his return timeline is usually at least two weeks or so.
Wesley Matthews replaced Schröder in the Lakers’ starting lineup on Thursday. If Schröder has to sit for a week or two, Matthews, Alex Caruso, and Quinn Cook are among the top candidates to play extra minutes.
The NBA has revealed its 2021 All-Star Game starters. Here are those names:
After missing all of the 2019/20 season while he recovered from a ruptured Achilles tendon, Durant is making his triumphant return to the All-Star Game. In his first appearance as a Brooklyn player, the 11-time All-Star will captain a team, having led the Eastern Conference in fan votes.
[RELATED: Community Shootaround: Eastern All-Stars]
This is the seventh All-Star appearance for Durant’s teammate Irving. Antetokounmpo, the reigning two-time MVP, has just made his fifth All-Star game. A frontrunner for the 2021 MVP award, Embiid is appearing in his fourth such contest. Beal will be making his first All-Star start after playing as a reserve in the 2018 and 2019 All-Star contests. The Wizards are the No. 13 seed in the East.
James, who was the top vote-getter in the Western Conference and the entire NBA with 5,922,554 fan votes, will again be a team captain. He will be suiting up for his 17th All-Star appearance, the third-most ever behind only fellow Laker legends Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (19 appearances) and Kobe Bryant (18). James was previously tied for making the third-most cumulative All-Star contests alongside Hall of Fame Nets and Sixers wing Julius Erving, who was selected into five ABA All-Star games and 11 NBA All-Star games.
Jokic, an early top MVP contender along with James and Embiid, will earn his first All-Star start in his third appearance in the game. Curry will partake in his seventh All-Star contest, while Leonard has just been voted into his fifth All-Star game.
[RELATED: Community Shootaround: Western All-Stars]
Doncic barely edged out Trail Blazers point guard Damian Lillard to be the second All-Star guard next to Curry among the starters, Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports tweets. Despite extended absences from starters CJ McCollum, Jusuf Nurkic, and Zach Collins, the Blazers boast an 18-10 record, good for the No. 4 seed in the crowded West, largely thanks to Lillard. The Mavericks, meanwhile, are 13-15, the No. 10 seed in the West.
As was the case during the last two years, the top vote-getters of each conference will captain a team, and will be able to draft players from either conference. The “Elam Ending,” which made the conclusion of last year’s game much more entertaining than it had been in recent years, is set to return again this year.
Earlier today, the league officially announced that the 2021 All-Star Game is set to take place at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, as a one-night event on March 7. The evening will also include its three All-Star weekend mainstay events: the Skills Competition, the Three-Point Contest and the Dunk Contest.
A full list of fan voting totals is viewable at this Twitter link, courtesy of Marc J. Spears of The Undefeated. The complete voting breakdown by position and conference, including media and player votes, can be found at the bottom of this press release.
The league will announce the 14 players who will comprise the All-Star reserves on Tuesday, February 22, at 7 p.m. ET, per Omari Sankofa II of the Detroit Free Press (via Twitter).
Warriors center Kevon Looney, sidelined since spraining his left ankle in a February 2 loss to the Celtics, has rejoined the Warriors for “segments of practice” and is planning on suiting up with the club during Golden State’s impending road trip, per Marc J. Spears of The Undefeated (Twitter link).
Connor Letourneau of the San Francisco Chronicle details the import of the big man’s return to the lineup in a new piece. “I always joked that I never hurt my ankle,” Looney said after incurring the injury. “I guess karma caught up with me.”
There’s more out of California:
It’s hard to imagine a trade scenario for Blake Griffin, according to a number of staff members on The Athletic. Griffin’s max salary and declining play make it nearly impossible to deal him. Griffin, who will reportedly sit until the Pistons can find a trade partner or buy him out, is a shell of his former All-Star self after multiple knee surgeries, as the story points out his inability to dunk and block shots any longer. The Celtics, Trail Blazers, Nets, Warriors, Lakers, Bucks, Kings and Spurs are all mentioned as possible destinations if Griffin is bought out.
We have more on the Pistons:
5:00pm: Davis did not have a rupture in his right Achilles tendon, according to a team press release. Wojnarowski notes (via Twitter) that today’s MRI did confirm a re-aggravation of Davis’ Achilles tendinosis in addition to his calf strain.
3:53pm: After undergoing an MRI, Davis has been diagnosed with a right calf strain and will be re-evaluated in two or three weeks, a source tells Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN (Twitter link). Woj adds (via Twitter) that the Lakers and Davis will take a conservative approach to his return, which could happen after the All-Star break.
8:32am: After missing two games last week due to right Achilles tendinosis, Lakers star Anthony Davis aggravated that issue during Sunday’s loss to the Nuggets when he bumped legs with Nikola Jokic, as Dave McMenamin of ESPN writes.
Davis, who was forced to leave the game early, was diagnosed with a right Achilles strain and will undergo an MRI on Monday after the Lakers arrive in Minnesota for Tuesday’s game against the Wolves, according to the team. The 27-year-old said he felt “completely fine” earlier in the day on Sunday, but is now waiting on further testing to confirm the diagnosis and to get a sense of his return timeline.
“I mean, you kind of learn a lot from the MRI, so kind of just waiting on that,” Davis said on Sunday night, per McMenamin. “Obviously, the doctors don’t want to rule out anything and then it’s something, or say it’s something, then it’s not. But they say everything looks good, but you still want the MRI just to make sure.”
We’ll have to wait for an official update from the Lakers following that MRI, but one expert who spoke to Jovan Buha of The Athletic speculated that the club may play it safe by giving Davis “multiple weeks” to fully recover. The Lakers’ big man sounds hopeful he’ll be back sooner than that, but acknowledged that a cautious approach is the right one with any Achilles issue.
“I do put a lot of pressure on myself to go out there and play. If I feel I can go out there and play, I will, Davis said. “… But this one is a little different that I definitely have to be smart with. I don’t want to go out there and try to play and risk it for the long term. So, all that is inclusive of what the MRI shows. Knock on wood, it’s great information — and I’ll be out there sooner than later.”
Kyle Kuzma figures to be first in line for an increased role if Davis misses time.
Before they signed veteran swingman Iman Shumpert in an effort to improve their wing defense, the Nets considered longtime Thunder forward Andre Roberson, sources tell Shams Charania of The Athletic. According to Brian Lewis of The New York Post (Twitter link), the Nets’ interest in Roberson wasn’t just cursory — the team actually worked him out before signing Shumpert.
Roberson, who is limited on offense but has a reputation as a defensive stopper, returned last August during the NBA’s summer restart after having missed over two full years due to knee issues. However, his contract expired at season’s end and he has yet to catch on with a new NBA team. Given how many of Brooklyn’s end-of-roster players have non-guaranteed salaries, it’s possible the Nets could open up a spot and circle back to Roberson later in the season, as Lewis notes.
Here’s more from Charania:
Anthony Davis missed two games this week because of Achilles tendinosis, but the Lakers star doesn’t expect it to be a long-term concern, writes Jovah Buha of The Athletic. After returning to the lineup with a 35-point performance Friday, Davis explained to reporters how the injury is affecting him.
“It felt great going into the game,” he said. “But as you play, I’m always using that Achilles tendon. It got sore towards the end from just constantly moving on it. But it felt great coming into the game, felt great throughout the game, but late game it was kind of bothering me a little bit. I felt like we had the game in hand when I was able to — and Coach felt that way — when I was able to sit down the last two and a half (minutes).”
Davis added that doctors told him the pain isn’t coming directly from the Achilles tendon, but from an adjacent body part in the same area of the leg. He said the quickest way to recover is through rest, but he doesn’t want to sit out a lot of games in a row.
“The doctors and training staff feel comfortable enough for me to go out there and perform as well,” Davis said. “So it’s something that’s gonna continue to get better. (I’m) constantly doing treatment on it throughout the day, throughout the night, and wearing stuff in my shoes to help out the pain level and wearing tape and all these things to make it feel better throughout the course of time, and basically, I’m very — I’m able to just go out there and play and not worry about it.”
There’s more from Los Angeles:
Lakers forward Kyle Kuzma signed a three-year, $40MM rookie scale extension in December. All other players who signed similar extensions before the season got bigger contracts but Kuzma has no regrets, according to Bill Oram of The Athletic.
“Of course, guys got paid,” the Lakers forward said, “and obviously as a competitor of who you are as a player, you always look at things like that. But at the end of the day, I love the situation that I’m in. … I know a lot of guys that are making $20, $23, $24 million and they’re not really that happy because they go to work every day, you may not be winning, you have to deal with certain other things. For me, I’m happy.”