Durant faces long odds after debilitating injury
As soon as Warriors forward Kevin Durant came up hopping Monday night after he collided with Raptors center Serge Ibaka in Game 5 of the NBA Finals, Dominique Wilkins — watching on TV nearly 1,000 miles away at his Atlanta-area home — sprang up from his chair and exclaimed, “That’s an Achilles!”
Nearly three decades ago, Wilkins was a 32-year-old AllStar for the Hawks when he tore his right Achilles tendon in a game against the 76ers. His reaction had been almost identical to Durant’s: the flinch when he felt the pop; the couple of hops before crumpling to the floor; the stunned facial expression when he realized what had just happened.
The Warriors believe testing will show that Durant — like Wilkins — tore his right Achilles tendon, league sources confirmed to The Chronicle on Tuesday. Durant flew to New York to be evaluated by doctors, sources said, and was scheduled to undergo an MRI.
As he waits to learn the severity of his injury, Durant is
left wrestling with a number of questions: Was Golden State’s training staff right to clear him for Game 5? How will this affect his free agency? Will he get another chance to make his case for the world’s best player?
A basketball junkie, Durant is already familiar with the long odds he faces. Players who tear an Achilles tendon are more likely to not play another NBA game than to return to their pre-injury form. Teammate DeMarcus Cousins, who is two years younger than Durant, struggled to regain his signature dominance this season as he recovered from a torn Achilles that sidelined him for almost a year.
But Wilkins, who made two more All-NBA teams after returning from his injury in nine months, is adamant that Durant will follow his blueprint and become an outlier. By putting his future at risk to help keep his team’s season alive, Durant showed how he responds when staring down a challenge.
“Durant is a guy who loves to play,” Wilkins said. “I have a lot of respect for him. I think the world of him. I sympathize with him. And, trust me, he’ll be fine. As a competitor, he’ll just see it as another opponent he can compete with.”
As speculation rat-a-tattatted about whether he even wanted to return for the Finals, Durant worked around the clock to speed up his recovery from a strained right calf. A league source told The Chronicle that, by the time he was cleared to practice Sunday after missing nine games, Durant’s pain pushing off his right foot was manageable.
Although he was cleared by multiple doctors to play Game 5 on Monday, Durant was not necessarily close to 100 percent. This was a calculated risk: With the Warriors one loss away from elimination, he was desperate to play, according to league sources.
Early in the second quarter, when Durant limped to the locker room after he fell to the floor on an attempted drive to his left, some were quick to scapegoat Rick Celebrini, the team’s first-year director of sports medicine and performance. Widely regarded as one of the world’s top sports physiotherapists, Celebrini is in charge of maximizing player availability.
“He was cleared to play tonight,” Warriors General Manager Bob Myers, fighting back tears, said after announcing that Durant had suffered an Achilles injury. “That was a collaborative decision. I don’t believe there’s anybody to blame, but I understand this world and if you have to, you can blame me. I run our basketball operations department.”
Asked whether there was a correlation between Durant’s calf strain and the Achilles injury, Myers conceded, “I’m not a doctor, I don’t know.” However, a calf injury and an Achilles injury to the same leg little more than a month apart could be related, said Dr. Kenneth Jung, a foot and ankle surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Kerlan-Jobe Institute in Los Angeles.
“If you’re coming off a calf injury, especially if it was only a month or so ago, you’re at a higher risk of either aggravating it or suffering an Achilles injury,” said Jung, who consults for the Los Angeles Lakers. “That risk is definitely higher if he’s still having pain there or soreness.
“The tissue was essentially still healing. He was essentially rehabbing during the playoff run, so it’s not really a true rehab that he was able to go through.”
Jung has not worked with the Warriors on Durant’s case, but explained the gray area in which these decisions are sometimes made in the NBA.
“Hindsight is always 20-20,” he said. “It’s a matter of weighing the risks and benefits, and they were just trying to figure out which decision was best under the circumstances. It’s not like the team mandated that Durant play that game.”
The most pressing question now is when Durant will return to the court. Typical recoveries for a torn Achilles tendon are six to 12 months, with the vast majority of players coming back after at least nine months.
A nine-month timetable would put Durant’s return at mid-March, about a month before the regular season ends. It’s possible for Durant to miss all of next season if his team opts to be cautious with him like the Warriors were with Cousins.
When Durant does finally return, he might not play at his usual level. The Achilles tendon, which connects the calf muscle to the heel bone, absorbs force when an athlete lands from a jump, then provides power when he or she pushes off the ball of the foot. Since a basketball player’s career depends on the ability to jump and change direction, Achilles injuries can be devastating.
According to a 2013 research paper published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, seven of the 18 NBA players (38.9%) who sustained major Achilles injuries between 1988 and 2011 did not come back to the league. Those who did return missed an average of 55.9 games the rest of their career, with only eight of the 11 playing a second season.
The few who did stick in the NBA for a while saw their playing time and production dip. ESPN’s SCHOENE projection system, which accounts for age and other factors besides injury that could affect someone’s performance, found that players coming off torn Achilles tendons have performed about 8% worse than projected.
However, there are reasons for optimism. Medical advances over the past decade have upped players’ chances of a successful recovery. Spurs forward Rudy Gay, for example, has enjoyed two of his most efficient seasons since suffering a torn Achilles in January 2017.
When free agency begins in three weeks, NBA teams must decide how much Durant’s injury has hurt his market value.
A Western Conference executive, speaking under the condition of anonymity, told The Chronicle that there should still be plenty of franchises willing to offer Durant maximum money despite the fact that he might miss all of next season. Given Durant’s generational talent, a star-hungry team could decide to direct its roster toward competing in 2020-21 when he has recovered from the Achilles injury.
It’s also possible the Warriors’ odds of re-signing Durant have improved after Monday. If he wants to keep the stress low and focus on his rehab, Durant might pick up his $31.5 million player option for next season and prepare for unrestricted free agency in summer 2020.
Those who’ve suffered an Achilles injury, however, know that Durant has tougher times ahead than deciding where he plays next season. After his 1992 surgery, Wilkins sank into a depression.
“When you go through something like this, there’s always going to be that question in the back of your mind of, ‘Can I get through this?’ ” Wilkins said. “It’s not until you return to the court, fall for the first time and feel no pain that you start to realize, ‘I can be the exact same guy I was before the injury.’ ”