Raptors’ Lowry to undergo surgery on wrist
Guard is expected to miss the rest of the regular season
Masai Ujiri defended the Toronto Raptors’ handling of Kyle Lowry’s wrist injury, despite the fact the point guard is scheduled to undergo surgery barely a week after playing in the NBA all-star game.
“I don’t think there’s any bad optics here,” the team president said. “If you look at the history of this kind of injury, players sometimes feel pain and sometimes they don’t feel pain. Sometimes if you feel that this thing is going to go away, and that’s how he felt. There were a couple of games when Kyle felt it in his wrist I’m sure, a couple times where he slept wrong and he felt it, there was swelling.
“(Sunday) Kyle felt OK actually, the swelling had gone down, we were very optimistic,” Ujiri added. “And then this morning it swelled up again.”
Lowry will undergo surgery on Tuesday to remove loose bodies from his right wrist. He’s expected to miss the rest of the regular season, with an aim to return in time for the playoffs.
The Raptors were in New York to play the Knicks on Monday and Lowry visited a surgeon there who operated on his broken left wrist in his rookie season, and a joint decision was made to perform the surgery now rather than have to deal with the nagging injury the rest of the season.
“Everybody drew the conclusion that it will be good to clean this out now rather than it be something that continues to re-occur,” Ujiri said on a conference call Monday. “With this kind of problem, when it lodges in the joint, there can be some discomfort one day and the next day you can feel good and then the next day you feel discomfort again, or there’s swelling.
“Obviously it’s a little disappointing for us, but we’re also lucky, we’re trying to get ahead of it, and hopefully there’s a good timeframe where he has this surgery and then we see how it goes,” he added. “But when you lose a player like that for a certain amount of time, Kyle is an all-star player, he leads our team in minutes, he leads our team in almost everything, there’s always going to be some sort of disappointment there. But the team goes on, and we’ll play our best and hold fort until he gets back.”
Lowry injured the wrist against Charlotte on Feb. 15, but played in the NBA all-star game four days later in New Orleans plus participated in the three-point shooting contest. He said he hadn’t thought the injury was serious. He received treatment from the Pelicans staff in New Orleans, and had the wrist bandaged with ice when he wasn’t on the floor.
With 23 games left in the regular season, it’s also a big blow to a team looking to climb back up the Eastern Conference standings.
Lowry is second on the team with his average of 22.8 points and leads the Raptors with 6.9 assists per game.