It’s the stretch run for the Los Angeles Lakers as they have less than 20 games to climb back into the playoff race.
The Lakers are in a precarious position as they are on the outside looking in of the postseason and will have to try and make up ground without LeBron James, who is expected to miss multiple weeks. Aside from James, Los Angeles has also been without D’Angelo Russell, who is dealing with an ankle sprain that has seriously tested their depth.
If the Lakers weren’t already shorthanded enough, the team made the surprising decision to sit Anthony Davis against the Oklahoma City Thunder on Wednesday in the second game of a back-to-back. Darvin Ham explained that it was a precautionary move as Davis continues to recover from the stress reaction in his foot, via Spectrum SportsNet:
“Just monitoring his stress reaction. We met as a group along with our medical staff and came up with the conclusion just to hold him out tonight. We’re trying to win all of these games, but as I mentioned the other night in regards to LeBron due to the circumstance…we don’t want the circumstances of winning or losing games to dictate how we handle our players’ health. It’s a precautionary move and there’s more steps he has to take and we feel comfortable about where we are with that.”
Stress reaction injuries can easily be aggravated, so Ham added that he and the training staff are in agreement on the plan moving forward:
“That’s just what it is. Just being mindful and with any type of stress reaction the wear-and-tear you constantly have to monitor that. We talked about all of it, we discussed it and that’s where it’s at.”
Ham’s comments might be confusing at first to some considering he previously said that James and Davis wouldn’t miss back-to-backs unless it was due to injury. However, it appears injury maintenance falls under that category even though Davis is healthy enough to suit up.
With this caveat, it’ll be interesting to see if they hold out Davis in the future especially because they have a couple of back-to-backs remaining. The purple and gold can’t afford to lose many more games, so it’s going to be a tough balancing act for Ham and his staff.
Darvin Ham says mission hasn’t changed even with LeBron James out
Losing James for the foreseeable future is a huge blow to the purple and gold, who had been stringing together wins with him on the floor. However, Ham remains determined to carry on without his superstar and emphasized that the team’s mission to make the playoffs hasn’t changed.
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