Siakam faces a dressing down
Injured star struggled to find something to wear on game days
The clothes. Pascal Siakam hates the clothes.
Oh, he detests not being able to play for the Raptors because of a groin injury — the first significant medical issue of his career — but the clothes thing is for the birds.
“The worst part was dressing up to sit on the bench,” Siakam joked Friday in his first meeting with the media since he went down with the groin injury Dec. 18 in Detroit.
“I know Serge (Ibaka, the team’s director of fashion) probably enjoys that stuff, but for me it was painful to find an outfit every game. I usually wear sweats. That’s the hardest part for me right there.”
Thankfully, the Raptors forward is edging closer every day to a return to playing. Siakam ramped up his work Friday — “some action basketball, semilive action basketball,” was how Raptors coach Nick Nurse described it — and it was the most serious work he has done since the end of the Pistons game.
No one is saying for sure when he or centre Marc Gasol will be back — the Raptors play San Antonio on Sunday and “that’s probably a bit ambitious,” Nurse said — but guard Norm Powell has been cleared to play against the Spurs. The Raptors play again Wednesday in Oklahoma City.
As much as Siakam wants to play, the decision isn’t entirely his.
“The most important thing for me was being able to see if I can be explosive and move laterally,” he said of the Friday session. “I can definitely run straight on the floor, but the problem is figuring out if you can move and be explosive.
“I have to make sure I can be 100 per cent and do everything I’m capable of doing and everything that helps my game. Until I feel like that, we’re going to take our time with it.”
There will certainly be expectations placed on Powell on Sunday, and on Siakam and Gasol when they return, and they will certainly be unfair. To ask any NBA player to pick up where he left off after missing 11 or 12 or 13 games is foolhardy and Raptors fans should be aware of that from recent history.
In his first five games back after missing11games this season, Kyle Lowry shot 28.5 per cent from the field and 20.5 per cent from three-point range as he worked himself back into game shape. Serge Ibaka, who missed 10 games, was slightly better and closer to normal, shooting 36.2 per cent from the field and 43.5 per cent from three in his first five games back after sitting out 10.
Neither, however, was fully ready for the speed and physicality of NBA games, nor the abilities of their opponents.
“I think, again, we’ve got a little experience with that, right, this year?” Nurse said. “We don’t snap our fingers and think … things are right where we picked up. We understand that there’s a little bit of time that needs to process, get some rust off, get some conditioning back, get some chemistry back, all those kinds of things.”
The Raptors have done more than tread water without Siakam, Gasol and Powell for 11 games — and now Fred VanVleet, who won’t play Sunday, for at least three. They have gone 6-5, maintaining their spot in the top four of the NBA’s Eastern Conference, and whenever they get back to full strength, they will be imbued with a new sense of confidence in each other. And Nurse will have far more information at his disposal about players who have assumed increased responsibility in the last three weeks.
“I think the starting lineup, if everybody’s healthy let’s say a month from now, is up for debate,” Nurse said.
Siakam was injured in the fourth quarter of that win over Detroit but kept playing on what was originally termed a “stretched groin” by the team. “It was definitely a bad idea for me to finish the game because I was really limping and it was really bothering me,” he said.
The original prognosis wasn’t good. “It was going to be up to four weeks, that’s what Alex (McKechnie, the team’s medical savant) told me from the beginning and I trusted him,” Siakam said. “It could have been five, six, it depended how my body reacted. I think it’s going really well, in terms of my body being able to move and do certain stuff.”