The NBA world is abuzz with Nikola Jokic finally set to return to the Nuggets’ lineup on Friday night after a 16-game absence with a knee injury, the longest of his career. It’s obviously a great injury update for a team that has been dying for one, but meanwhile, the Nuggets got a much less exciting update on Thursday, when it was announced that Aaron Gordon will be reevaluated in 4-6 weeks after reaggravating his hamstring injury.
In the short term, the team should be fine with Jokic back at the helm, but to be on the level of the Thunder as title contenders, the Nuggets need all of their core players at full strength, and AG is absolutely vital to everything they do, especially on the defensive end.
He has been plagued with soft tissue injuries over the past couple of seasons, and when he went down again this season in November, the idea was that this is something that must be managed for the rest of his career and may well linger.
Gordon was out from November 21st to January 4th, but came back and quickly started looking very good on the court. But then, last Friday against the Bucks, Gordon pulled down a rebound and looked to push the ball the other way before coming up lame and exiting the game just before halftime.
Nuggets must second guess decision to let AG play vs. Bucks
And now we find out that Gordon did indeed re-injure the same hamstring and will miss at least another month. It’s a possibility that he won’t be back long before the end of the regular season, and it may be tough for him to fully ramp up before the playoffs.
Then he’ll be coming back and immediately stepping into the most highly pressurized situations, surely risking another aggravation. It’s a brutal situation for a team that was finally set to be back close to full strength for the first time in months.
To make matters worse, the Nuggets and Gordon have to be kicking themselves over the fact that he was even playing in that game. The team had won a hard-fought game over the Wizards on Thursday night, and almost every other rotation player was out on Friday to rest.
But Gordon said he felt as good as ever, and clearly wanted to go out there and try to get another win and prove that he was 100% by completing the back-to-back. That seems like an awful lot of risk for a relatively meaningless game in January.
Somebody in the organization should have stepped in and realized that this was a crazy, reckless decision. We’ll never know how much extra risk was added by playing on consecutive nights, but whatever it was, it wasn’t worth it.
Hopefully, he’ll come back on the sooner side of his timeline and will quickly be back up to speed and fresh for the playoffs. But now, that’s far from a guarantee, and it seems somewhat possible that this situation could have been avoided.