The San Antonio Spurs were warming up to play the Denver Nuggets this evening, when 2x Champion Pau Gasol went down before the game even began.
Gasol broke the fourth metacarpal in his left hand. (In english) That pretty much means that the 6x All-Star has a broken hand.
Although he’s been ruled out “indefinitely,” the normal healing time for a metacarpal injury, depending on how severe the injury is, typically is a 3-7 week healing process.
In Gasol’s 16 year NBA career, he’s managed to miss 218 games so far. That’s only 17% of his career. In most cases, with the big role that Gasol has on the team with the second best record in the NBA (32-9), he’d be right back out there after getting the okay to play in a few weeks.
Unfortunately, this won’t be like most cases. Gasol is a 36 year old veteran in the NBA now and playing under coach Greg Popovich, San Antonio will probably have him take some extra time off to fully heal. If you’re new to watching the NBA, then you probably don’t know that the Spurs are a very quiet and poise team, who make all of their noise and give their players big minutes come playoff time. In fact, only 2 players (Kawhi Leonard & LaMarcus Aldridge) average over 26 minutes per game.
In conclusion to only hours after Gasol’s pre-game incident, it should be expected that he’ll be back a couple weeks after the All-Star break and be ready for playoff basketball in April in no time. In the mean time, David Lee and Dewayne Dedmon should be expecting a lot more minutes these next few weeks to keep the Spurs on track to try and stay atop of the Western Conference.
