Smart move. Save him for second round series against OKC.

The season is over for me. Can’t believe it.

DJ, I wish I had something better to say. I mean it is unbelievable how this team rounded out to top form until the very end of the season just to see it plunge into the ocean with all these season ending injuries. I still can’t wrap my head around this.

FROM ABOVE ARTICLE:

Now Doncic and Austin Reaves are both sidelined at least for the rest of the regular season and likely through the first round of the playoffs. The injury updates that came on consecutive days following Thursday’s 43-point loss to Oklahoma City felt like a devastating series of gut punches. Coach JJ Redick often talks about “not letting go of the rope.” The Lakers will have to white-knuckle their way through the next few weeks without their two stars.

Why is Luka Doncic in Europe?

Lakers star Luka Doncic reacts after sustaining a hamstring injury against the Oklahoma City Thunder on April 2.
Lakers star Luka Doncic reacts after sustaining a hamstring injury against the Oklahoma City Thunder on April 2. (Cooper Neill / Getty Images)
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He knows magic. Now Luka Doncic needs medicine to help pull off his next stunning trick.

With the playoffs approaching, Doncic traveled to Europe to seek treatment for his strained left hamstring, his agent, Bill Duffy, confirmed to The Times’ Broderick Turner. The hope is that with specialized treatments, Doncic can speed up what is typically a four- to six-week recovery process and get back in time for at least part of the Lakers postseason, which begins April 18.

Ultrasound-guided platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections and stem cell injections are the most common treatments for injuries of this nature, said Kenton Fibel, a primary care sports medicine specialist at Cedars-Sinai Orthopaedics.

The biologic injections can speed up healing of injured tissue. PRP injections use the natural growth and anti-inflammatory factors in platelets to promote healing while stem cells harvested from a patient’s bone marrow or adipose tissue similarly help with the regeneration and turnover of the healing tissue into normal muscle tendon tissue, Fibel said.

Top U.S. athletes have gone to Europe to seek the treatments for decades. Kobe Bryant, former Colts quarterback Andrew Luck and San Francisco 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey are among those who’ve crossed the pond for solutions to chronic injuries. But similar treatments are also available in the United States.

In the U.S., only PRP and stem cell injections coming from a patient’s own body are allowed and the cells are not allowed to be manipulated, Fibel said. With looser regulations in Europe, doctors can attempt to increase the concentration of anti-inflammatory factors in a single PRP sample or culture stem cells over days to increase the number of them with hopes of speeding up healing even more.

Whether there is a significant increase in efficacy between the cutting-edge European treatments compared to the U.S. methods is unclear, Fibel said, but an athlete’s decision to pursue treatment often comes down to individual comfort level or prior experiences.

The ubiquity of degenerative conditions or recurring soft tissue injuries in sports have turned European countries, including Germany and Switzerland, into hot spots for top athletes searching for help.

“These are injuries that are not always that easy to completely prevent, and it’s also not the easiest to always prevent reaggravation,” Fibel said. “And so I think [the new treatments] also comes from a frustration of doing a lot of the treatments and modalities that were used in prior injuries and still having an issue afterwards [so] that they’re searching for something new and different.”

Doncic knows the routine when it comes to hamstring injuries. As a player who thrives on his shifty change of pace, Doncic’s quick start and stop motions put extra load on his hamstrings and put him at risk of reinjury. Another left hamstring strain sidelined him for four games earlier this season.

Now with a Grade 2 injury, Doncic’s timeline for recovery would typically be four to six weeks. A Grade 2 injury shows “true disruption” that involves about 50% of the tissue, Fibel said. The most severe Grade 3 is used to describe a more significant, if not complete, tear of the muscle or tendon. The Lakers have suffered several Grade 2 injuries this season, including Austin Reaves’ latest left oblique strain.

The timing of the injuries couldn’t be worse for the Lakers. Not only do the playoffs begin in less than two weeks, but the Lakers were playing their best basketball of the season before the injuries to Doncic and Reaves. They appeared to be legitimate contenders in the playoffs. Now they must wait to see if Doncic’s super serum turns him into a superhero capable of saving their postseason.

“[Doncic is] going to go through all the necessary things to be back at some point,” Redick said, “and it’s our job again to extend the season so both those guys can get back.”

FROM ABOVE ARTICLE:

With Luka Dončić set to appeal for his eligibility, the NBA is going to delay voting on season awards.

If it wasn’t already a mess, the NBA’s award voting process is about to face another challenge.

As it stands, Luka Dončić is not eligible for postseason awards. However, he intends to appeal that by using the Extraordinary Circumstances Challenge, citing him having to travel Europe for the birth of his child earlier this season.

In his latest piece on Substack, longtime NBA reporter Marc Stein laid out where the complications are going to lie moving forward. Typically, the NBA sends out award voting electronically on midnight Sunday night/Monday morning after the season ends and gives voters roughly 36 hours before the submission deadline.

At the same time, Luka can not submit his appeal until the season ends. So, both of these can’t happen simultaneously. Voters need to know if Luka is eligible before submitting ballots. As a result, according to Stein, the league will delay voting on awards until after a resolution in Luka’s case.

League rules stipulate that such a challenge can only be filed on the final day of the regular season (April 12 in this case). The league will have to rule on the challenge before releasing it’s electronic ballots to voters, meaning that the voting process might be delayed slightly from its planned April 13-14 window.

The rules in the CBA state that the hearing with an independent expert must take place within two days, the hearing can not last longer than one day and a resolution must come one day later. In short, this will all move pretty fast once the appeal is submitted.

An answer will be had during the week between the regular season and playoffs as to whether Luka will be eligible for awards, so this process won’t drag out into the postseason or beyond.

Again, all of this is but a small silver lining in what likely will end up as a lost season, but at least there remains a realistic chance that Luka could still get the rightful credit for his brilliant performance this year.

FROM ABOVE ARTICLE:

DALLAS – Luka Dončić traveled to Europe on Sunday to receive aggressive treatment on his injured hamstring in an effort to speed up his recovery, league sources told The Athletic.

Dončić suffered a Grade 2 hamstring strain Thursday in the Los Angeles Lakers’ loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder. The team ruled him out for only the rest of the regular season, though Grade 2 strains generally take multiple weeks, and in some cases more than a month, to heal.

The playoffs begin in two weeks.

“I just know that he’s gonna do everything he can to try to be back,” coach JJ Redick said pregame Sunday. “I talked to him Friday. I talked to him again yesterday. I talked to him again this morning. He’s going to go through all the necessary things to be back at some point, and it’s our job again to extend the season so both those guys can get back.”

Shortly after learning the Lakers would be without Dončić, the team announced Austin Reaves would also miss the rest of the regular season with a Grade 2 oblique strain — another injury generally with a timeline of four to six weeks.

The Lakers lost their first game without their leading scorers Sunday in Dallas, falling 134-128 to the Mavericks. LeBron James led the Lakers with 30 points and 15 assists. Guard Marcus Smart remained out with ankle soreness — the seventh straight game he has missed.

Pregame Sunday, Redick said internal medical data showed no signs of overuse with Dončić before the game with the Thunder. While he grabbed at his hamstring in the first half, he was medically cleared to return to the game. Minutes into the third quarter, Dončić crumpled to the ground after planting his left leg, again reaching for the hamstring.

If Dončić returns from his Grade 2 hamstring strain by the playoffs, he will be going against recent NBA history with these injuries.

Reaves, also, was put back in the game after suffering his initial injury.

“As a coach, you go on the information you have,” Redick said. “He was medically cleared. When Austin came back, I asked directly. I thought he was hurt. (I was told), ‘No, he’s medically cleared.’ The group wanted to go for it in the second half. Talked about it at halftime. And I think, for both those guys, the nature of playing heavy minutes, that’s certainly a part of, like any equation when you’re trying to manage workloads. We also rely on the tracking data, and we’re looking at that after every game. You know, acceleration, jumps, workload, all of those things.

“And there have been a few times this year where it’s gone, away from the standard deviation of whatever their baseline is, and we make the proper adjustments. There was nothing leading into that game that would suggest either those guys were ‘running hot,’ as we call it.”

Redick said both Dončić and Reaves will try to return in the playoffs, calling it the Lakers’ “job to extend the season so that they can come back.”