Lakers' Austin Reaves Out for Season With Oblique Injury, and the West Just Got Tighter
The Lakers are hemorrhaging. Austin Reaves is done for the regular season with a Grade 2 left oblique muscle injury, sources told ESPN. The team announced it Saturday, and while the Lakers won't say exactly when he's back, ESPN's Shams Charania reports Reaves is looking at four to six weeks on the shelf. That basically ends his regular season right there with only five games left to play.
This is the second massive blow in two days. Luka Doncic got diagnosed Friday with a Grade 2 left hamstring strain that will sideline him indefinitely for the rest of the regular season. The Lakers have not provided a timetable for his return beyond the regular season ending. For context, a hamstring injury like that typically needs about a month to recover. The first round of the playoffs starts in two weeks.
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Reaves tweaked his left side in the first half of the Lakers' 139-96 loss to the Thunder on Thursday. He came back for evaluation but returned to the game anyway and led the team with 15 points in 27 minutes. After the game he said, "I went back to get a rebound, overextended a little bit, and I felt something. But I feel decent right now, so we'll see." Spoiler alert: it wasn't decent.
The MRI process was a mess. Reaves needed two scans because Dallas imaging scanned the wrong area on the first one. Coach JJ Redick did not hold back about it: "I don't know where the chain of command lies with Dallas imaging, but they scanned the wrong area. Not on our end."
Lakers Still Fighting
The injury report is piling up. Marcus Smart was ruled out against the Mavericks on Saturday, marking his seventh straight game missed. Jarred Vanderbilt was added as questionable with right calf soreness.
But Redick isn't waving the white flag. "Our mission, it hasn't changed," he said Saturday. "The rest of these guys and my staff, we're going after the 3-seed and we're going to try to win a playoff series. And we'll see what happens with Luka."
The Lakers sit at 50-27 with a one-game lead on the No. 4 Nuggets, two games ahead of the No. 5 Rockets, and three up on the No. 6 Timberwolves. They hold the tiebreaker against all three teams. Five games left. That's the window now.
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