Unfortunately, the Los Angeles Lakers received more injury news as it was announced that
Austin Reaves will be re-evaluated in one week with a mild left calf strain.
Calf strains have seemingly become a common injury this season and teams have expressed extreme caution. Notably, Damian Lillard and Tyrese Haliburton played through it last year, only to then suffer Achilles tears.
While a strain may seem insignificant, the potential for a more serious injury is there. On the bright side, L.A. only plays two games this week, meaning Reaves should not miss much game time.
After practice on Saturday, head coach JJ Redick revealed how the injury occurred and the plan for Reaves moving forward.
“For him, it’s hard to pinpoint an exact time during the game,” Redick said. “It had started to tighten up the day before even though he did very light work intentionally. Just one of those things and we’re obviously gonna be cautious with it.”
Redick added that Reaves shouldn’t miss more than one week of action, which is obviously great news.
“Yeah, it’s a mild strain, grade one. He’ll be out a week,” Redick said.
Given the ramifications that could come with playing through a calf injury though, the Lakers will not rush Reaves back.
“I would venture to say every player is a little different, but players now are becoming more cautious, to use that word again. More cautious when they get those diagnoses with the calf. But everything looks clean, it’s not in the deep part… It should be a week,” Redick said.
Considering how important Reaves has been for the Lakers this season, Redick knows he will need to make some changes with lineups to make up for his absence.
“Very. He kind of makes a lot of things work for us. For the next week, we’ll play different lineups.”
Thankfully, Luka Doncic is a Laker and he can inherit more of a workload without his backcourt mate. In previous seasons, Los Angeles lacked ball-handlers outside of LeBron James, but now that is not an issue.
Outside of Doncic and James, Redick also got Marcus Smart back from injury, along with Gabe Vincent. However, Reaves was averaging 27.8 points through 21 games and who picks up for that scoring punch will be interesting to see.
Currently, L.A. is last in bench scoring, only averaging 24.5 points, so in all likelihood, there will be more reliance on the starters putting up more points. Hopefully, Reaves returns sooner rather than later, but Redick will need to find ways to make up for his second-leading scorer on the sideline.
Austin Reaves: Lakers have a lot of room for growth defensively
Before this season kicked off, defense was a concern for the Lakers due to the lack of two-way talent on the roster. But, JJ Redick made due last year as they were a No. 1 ranked defense following the Luka Doncic trade.
Sadly, that caliber of team defense has yet to present itself and Redick is currently searching for answers. Austin Reaves, from a player’s perspective,
knows that there is plenty of room for improvement defensively as they are not on a string currently.
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