Lakers’ Anthony Davis could miss a month with foot injury
It has become an unsettlingly familiar feeling for the Lakers: After a freakish injury, Anthony Davis appears to be on track to miss significant time.
That doesn’t make it any easier to stomach.
Davis, the team’s leading scorer (27.4 ppg), rebounder (12.1 rpg) and shot-blocker (2.1 bpg), could miss as much as a month with a right foot injury suffered on Friday night against the Denver Nuggets, a development first reported by The Athletic and confirmed to Southern California News Group by a person close to the team.
It continues a troubling trend of the 29-year-old — who has played arguably the best basketball of his L.A. tenure this season — spending as much time on the shelf as on the floor.
Officially, the Lakers are continuing evaluation of Davis, whose right foot appeared to make awkward contact with the leg of Denver’s Nikola Jokic in the first quarter of Friday’s game. He’s been ruled out of Sunday afternoon’s game against the Washington Wizards, but few other details have been provided.
Davis and the Lakers have cited the big man’s health as the most important factor in the success of the team, which is struggling at 12th place in the West at 12-16 as of Sunday morning. Davis played only 76 of 154 possible games in the 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons, a bitter disappointment to a player who was All-NBA first team in the Lakers’ 2020 run to a title. Notably, Davis missed 18 straight games last season with a right foot sprain when he landed awkwardly on Rudy Gobert.
Before getting hurt, Davis was well on his way to reestablishing himself as one of the league’s best big men: He averaged 30.3 points, 12.9 rebounds and 2.4 blocks while shooting over 64% from the field in the Lakers’ last 15 games. The team has outscored opponents by 48 points in his minutes this season.
“For me, it’s just being locked in, staying with a mindset of being aggressive, not taking the game off and coming out with the mindset of dominating,” Davis said earlier this month after scoring 55 points against the Wizards. “Whatever I got to do to help the team win — whether that’s scoring, rebounding, blocking shots. Whatever it is, I’m just trying to do my part.”
Without him, the Lakers have been 1-2, and they are 1-1 in games in which Davis has checked out early, including the win over Denver on Friday. More responsibility is likely to fall on 25-year-old Thomas Bryant (9.4 ppg, 4.2 rpg) and little-used Damian Jones (120 total minutes in 14 games). As a team, the Lakers are often undersized to their opponents, a situation exacerbated by injuries to 6-foot-9 Wenyen Gabriel and 6-foot-6 Juan Toscano-Anderson.
But much of the attention will turn to the Lakers’ remaining stars: LeBron James and Russell Westbrook. James has seen some of his greatest struggles with age this season, seeing his effective field goal percentage decline (53.5%) to its lowest point since his 2014-15 season in Cleveland. Westbrook has had an up-and-down season, exemplified by a move to the bench that has sometimes had good results for the Lakers.
Their fit together has been one of the Lakers’ biggest quagmires of the last two seasons, one of the reasons why the coaching staff has given Westbrook a reserve role to give him more possessions as the primary ball-handler and playmaker. James and Westbrook have averaged just 17.2 minutes on the court together this season, with a minus-0.5 net rating when they share the floor.
There have been recent signs of synergy between the two, however, in dominant stretches against Boston and Denver when the Lakers have been able to lean on both.
“I just think the positioning, and Bron does a great job of running the floor, and when I’m on the break, I know he’s the best ever once he gets a head of steam,” Westbrook said Friday night. “There’s not too much people can do with it, and it’s my job to better find him and make the game easy for him.”
Unfortunately for the Lakers, very little about the upcoming stretch will be “easy.” After the Wizards, the Lakers close out December with six of their final seven games on the road.