Johnson: ‘mild’ hammy injury won’t keep me sidelined long
The Nets will begin training camp Tuesday with one presumptive starter already injured — and it’s not Ben Simmons.
Cam Johnson sustained a mild left hamstring strain during an on-court workout last week, and will miss the start of camp. The Nets provided no other information about his estimated return date, but the forward tried to tamp down any worries and reassured it was a slight injury.
“Just something I felt at the end of last week. It happened, we’re addressing it, rehabbing. It’ll be good, nothing too crazy,” Johnson shrugged. Brooklyn categorized Johnson’s injury as “mild.” With the Nets preseason opener coming next Monday against the Lakers in Las Vegas, it remains to be seen how many of their four tuneup games Johnson will miss, but he was confident of playing before the opener Oct. 25 against Cleveland.
“Yeah, I’m good,” Johnson said. “I do expect to play at some point in preseason, just not in these next couple of days, and we’ll see how it goes in this next week.”
With Simmons finally recovered from his back woes, the Nets had expected to be whole for coach Jacque Vaughn’s first training camp in charge. No such luck.
Johnson, 27, arrived with Mikal Bridges in the February trade that sent Kevin Durant to Phoenix. He averaged 16.6 points and 4.8 rebounds on 37.2 percent shooting from deep in 25 games for the Nets. A restricted free agent this past offseason, he inked a four-year, $94.5 million deal, then played for Team USA in the FIBA World Cup to cap off a long summer.
“The takeaways from it: awesome experience. Obviously we wanted to win, we didn’t win, that hurts, that sucks. But there’s so many positives to take away from it, and I’m really grateful to Team USA and to the group of coaches and players and staff that I was able to go on that trip with,” said Johnson, 6-foot-8, 220 pounds, who felt his workload has still been managed properly.
“The leg is just a bump in the road. Sometimes those things happen. Thankfully, nothing too major. I’ll be fine. But I feel good outside of that. I felt good playing last week, I felt good in the ramp-up back towards training camp, and then I’ll try to continue that momentum through this next week or so and keep the conditioning up and hopefully just be able to slide right back in when that time comes and hit the ground running going into the season.”
For this season, Johnson is expected to provide much of the team’s outside shooting. He’s the only player on the roster who hit over 40 percent from deep last season — 40.4 percent overall, and 45.2 for the Suns. With the departures of Joe Harris, Patty Mills, Yuta Watanabe and Seth Curry (along with Durant and Kyrie Irving), the Nets will need all the shooting they can get this season.