This is exactly what the Lakers and their fans feared when they saw Luka Doncic pull up and grab his hamstring in the third quarter Thursday night.
Doncic has been diagnosed with a Grade 2 hamstring strain and will be out for the remainder of the regular season, the Lakers announced. While the Lakers did not discuss the playoffs — which begin April 18, just more than two weeks away — a Grade 2 strain typically takes at least three weeks to heal, and more often players are out for a month or more.
This injury could have a couple of significant impacts.
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The first is on the Lakers’ playoff seeding and first-round matchup. Los Angeles is currently the No. 3 seed in the West, just one game ahead of No. 4 seed Denver and 2.5 games ahead of No. 5 seed Houston (Minnesota is sixth). The advantage for the Lakers is that Denver has the toughest remaining schedule in the NBA, but the Lakers have some challenging games remaining in the final nine days of the season, including against the Thunder, Suns, and Warriors with Stephen Curry back in the lineup. If the Lakers go into any playoff series in the West without Doncic for at least the first few games, they will be heavy underdogs.
The other is Doncic’s MVP and First Team All-NBA case. Doncic has played in 64 games, one shy of the league’s mandated 65-game threshold to qualify for postseason awards. As it stands, if he misses the rest of the regular season, he would be ineligible for any postseason honors, even though voters would put him there. (ESPN’s MVP straw poll that came out Friday had Doncic fourth in that race.)
There is a potential exception for Doncic, the “extraordinary circumstances challenge.” That challenge states that if “it was impractical for the player to play in one or more of the [missed] games” and the player would have reached 65 games if he had played in those games, an independent arbiter (selected by the league and player’s union) can grant him an exception. Doncic missed two games in December for the birth of his child.
Doncic’s agent, Bill Duffy, said in a statement to ESPN’s Shams Charania that he would file that challenge.
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“This season, Luka Dončić has performed at a historic level, leading the league in scoring, carrying the Lakers to third place in the Western Conference and placing himself in the middle of one of the most tightly contested MVP races in memory. To ensure that Luka’s incredible accomplishments this season are rightly honored and he can be considered for the league’s end-of-season awards, we intend to apply for an “Extraordinary Circumstances Challenge” to the 65-game rule. Luka missed two games this season for the birth of his second child in Slovenia. His daughter was born on Dec. 4 on another continent, and yet he was back in the United States competing with his team on Dec. 6. Luka has gone to great lengths to show up for his team and this league this season. His record-breaking season deserves to be noted in the history books, despite last night’s unfortunate injury and other extraordinary circumstances. We look forward to working with the NBAPA and the league office to ensure a fair outcome in this matter.”
Doncic has played at an MVP-level this season, averaging a league-leading 33.8 points per game, while adding 7.8 rebounds and 8.3 assists a night. He has been the driving force behind the Lakers being one of the hottest teams in the league down the stretch.
The injury occurred in the third quarter Thursday night of a Thunder blowout win against the Lakers. Doncic tried to drive on OKC’s Jalen Williams, stopped sharply for what appeared to be one of his trademark pull-up jumpers, but then instantly dropped the ball and grabbed his hamstring in pain. Soon after he limped directly to the locker room,l and was clearly very emotional about the injury.
Issues with his left hamstring have been a season-long story for Doncic. He injured that hamstring prior to the season, missed four games because of it during the season, and has had on-and-off hamstring soreness since before the All-Star Game. In February, he had an MRI on his left hamstring, but that did not show anything that caused him to miss time.
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Now, unfortunately, he is going to miss a lot of time at the biggest moment of the season.
