DALLAS — Twenty-four hours in Dallas has dramatically shifted the Lakers’ season for the second time, this time due to another injury that will sideline another of their starters for the rest of the regular season.
The Lakers announced Saturday afternoon that Austin Reaves would become the team’s second star to miss at least the final five games of the regular season, after he suffered a Grade 2 left oblique muscle injury. On Friday, the Lakers announced that Luka Doncic would miss at least the remainder of the regular season with a Grade 2 hamstring strain.
Now, atop the Lakers’ three-star operation, only LeBron James remains available and healthy with the first round of the NBA playoffs set to begin on April 18. Following the team’s announcement, ESPN reported that it is believed that Reaves will be out for four to six weeks.
Reaves briefly left Thursday night’s 139-96 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder after grabbing at his left side during the end of the first quarter. The 27-year-old guard, who is averaging 23.3 points per game, returned to the game for the start of the second quarter and exited alongside James and center Deandre Ayton when the fourth quarter began and the game was already in blowout territory.
Reaves said he was reaching down for a rebound and “overextended a little bit,” causing the discomfort. He added that he got treatment on the issue at halftime and re-entered the game.
“He was in a weird position, stretching for a basketball, loose ball, and just felt something like intercostal, somewhere in his back, in between the ribs,” Redick said. “He was able to play through it and battled back. But we’ll see how he feels tomorrow.”
The team was awaiting results on Reaves’ MRI – the second scan after a first MRI in Dallas was conducted on the wrong area of Reaves – earlier Saturday before practice at Southern Methodist University began.
Redick said they made it “explicit” where Reaves was injured, and yet the first MRI was still faulty. Now, the Lakers have the results and must make do without 48.9% of their scoring – Reaves and Doncic combine to average 57 points per game – for the foreseeable future.
Redick had said that the team considered removing Doncic, who suffered his hamstring strain in the third quarter against Oklahoma City, and Reaves at halftime. But with both players cleared, the team opted to give it a shot, and see if the Lakers could cut into a significant deficit by the halfway point of the third quarter.
“If we didn’t cut in the lead, we were gonna pull them,” Redick said. “And obviously it was around that time – I don’t remember the exact time – but (Doncic’s injury) happened.”
The Lakers (50-27) play the Dallas Mavericks on Sunday night, which will now become a test of the Lakers’ depth without Doncic and Reaves, who are not just their leading scorers but also their primary ballhandlers.
“All hands on deck,” Redick said earlier Saturday at practice.
Veteran guard Marcus Smart was officially ruled out for the Dallas game on Saturday – his seventh consecutive game missed – while forward Jarred Vanderbilt was added to the injury report as questionable with right calf soreness.
The Lakers have a half-game lead on the fourth-place Denver Nuggets (50-28), a two-game lead on the fifth-place Houston Rockets (48-29) and a four-game lead on the sixth-place Minnesota Timberwolves (46-31) with five games left in the regular season. The Lakers also hold the tiebreaker against all three of those teams when it comes to Western Conference playoff seeding, having already won the season series against each one.
