• Kyle Lowry to have wrist surgery Tuesday
• Questions around how injury was handled
• Raptors unable to roll out complete new-look lineup
The best and worst thing about being a professional athlete is that performance trumps (almost) all. Get to work, get it done and if people have a problem with the how or the why or anything else, you can just point to the numbers, the wins and the losses. The answers are almost always all right there.
Perform and the questions don’t matter. Perform and you get paid. Fail and questions are all you get.
The problem Kyle Lowry has for the moment is he can’t perform. After a few days of mixed messages about his sore right wrist — privately team officials didn’t think there was great cause for alarm — something definitive emerged Monday afternoon and it hit like a bag of sand for Raptors fans salivating at the prospect of seeing a rested, revitalized Lowry get to work with a healthy lineup bolstered by the trade deadline additions of Serge Ibaka and P.J. Tucker.
The club announced that Lowry will have surgery on Tuesday morning to remove "loose bodies" from his wrist. Lowry was in New York with the Raptors Monday and was further evaluated by the surgeon who operated on his left wrist during his rookie season.
The hope is that he will miss four to five weeks, which provides some optimism that he’ll be have a chance to play in as many as nine games before the playoffs start if everything goes well. Even at the outside of that range, Lowry should have three or four games to get up to speed and gain some comfort with Ibaka and Tucker.
"It’s a little disappointing for us," Raptors president Masai Ujiri said on a conference call. "But we’re also lucky…[we’ll] try to get ahead of it and hopefully it’s a good time for it where he has the surgery tomorrow and we see how it goes. 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 a lot of things — there’s always going to be some sort of disappointment there. The team goes on, and we’ll play our best and hold home court until he gets back."
Said Lowry to reporters in New York, where the Raptors played the Knicks Monday night: "There’s something in there that’s unfortunately in a bad position. For me to play I’ve got to get it cleaned out. I’d rather get it done now so I can get some time to heal and get back to help my teammates out."
The sudden news has, at the very least, pushed back the opportunity to see what is on paper the best and most complete roster the Raptors have ever had: all-stars Lowry and DeRozan surrounded by depth and quality at every position on the floor. No team in the NBA had done as much, arguably, to improve themselves at the deadline.
Toronto’s three wins without Lowry in the lineup, featuring a ragged, DeRozan-centric offence bolstered by long stretches of stifling fourth-quarter defence whetted the appetite even more. Imagine what this group would look like with Lowry running the show up top?
Everyone will have to wait to find out.
Until then? Rather than bask in the buzz of a well-executed trade deadline and the prospect of reeling in Boston for second place in the Eastern Conference down the stretch, there are questions about how this all came to pass, about what could have been done differently.
Injuries happen and in normal circumstances Lowry’s would just be put down to bad luck. He noticed the problem after the Raptors’ win over the Charlotte Hornets on Feb. 15, the last game before all-star weekend, although he can’t point to a specific play or incident. To hear Lowry explain it, he never thought he was really injured.
"I’m always thinking I’m going to be all right, I’m going to be okay," he said. "The next day, on Thursday, I woke up and, I’m a little sore but I’ll be fine. Go through the weekend, yeah, I’m a little sore but I’m going to enjoy this weekend, have my friends and family around. I never thought it would be anything where I needed surgery."
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In his four years in Toronto, the hard-nosed point guard has played through every kind of on-court knick and knock imaginable. Toughness is part of his ability and he’s adored at the Air Canada Centre because of it. Factor in the obvious pains he’s taken the past 18 months to transform his body to raise his level of play and extend his career and you have a consummate professional.
It’s worth noting, too, that as a pending free agent lining up to potentially sign a five-year contract worth in the range of $200 million, no one has more incentive to be cautious about his health than Lowry.
But with the benefit of hindsight the question remains: was he cautious enough? Were the Raptors vigilant enough? We’ll never know. Certainly Ujiri thinks conflating anything that happened over the all-star break with the situation the Raptors and Lowry are in now is a mistake.
"I don’t think there’s any bad optics here," he said. "If you look at the history of this kind of injury, players sometimes feel pain and sometimes they don’t feel pain … [Sunday] Kyle felt OK, actually. The swelling had gone down. He felt OK; we were very optimistic. And then it swelled up again. Humbly, I say I don’t think it should be questioned…I don’t think Kyle will look at that and say, ‘Hey, I put myself in this position.’"
The most likely explanation for all of this is bad luck. Had the all-star break not occurred when it had, chances are Lowry’s injury would have been diagnosed earlier, he’d already have had surgery and the timeline would have been moved up by a week or 10 days.
But from a distance it’s easy to argue that the whole thing looks strange and arguably may been mishandled by Lowry or the team or some combination, but mainly by Lowry who may simply have overestimated his ability to bounce back from what seemed like a minor irritation.
He had it looked at and treated by the New Orleans Pelicans training staff at the all-star game, but there were no red flags brought up and he participated fully in the three-point contest on the Saturday night of all-star weekend, the game itself on Sunday night and, according to a report in the Toronto Star, a game of golf on Sunday morning.
But not all was right. Lowry was icing his wrist through the weekend and he said his wrist was affecting his shooting both in the three-point contest and the game.
Lowry left right after the game for three days in the Turks and Caicos Islands. According to a source at Provo Golf Club — the only golf course in the area — Lowry didn’t play golf while there although he has in the past. "We have a lot of NFL players here right now, but we didn’t have any NBA guys," he said. "They usually come in the summer."
Lowry’s return to Toronto was delayed and he missed the team’s practice on Thursday (he and DeRozan were excused from the practice on Wednesday), which Ujiri didn’t publicly or privately make an issue.
And while Lowry was hopeful that three days of rest in the Caribbean would settle his wrist down, it had no effect, he said last Friday.
"I went to the gym [Thursday] and tried to shoot but it didn’t go very well," he said after watching the Raptors comeback against the Boston Celtics from the sidelines. "I put up one shot and it just didn’t work."
The nature of having "loose bodies" in a joint is that sometimes they float around and are barely noticeable, other times they get stuck in spots and are the equivalent of a pebble in a show. What impact participating in the three-point contest, the all-star game and whatever else had on Lowry’s wrist, it was worse when he got back than it was when he was in New Orleans, it would seem.
Lowry has no regrets.
"No, not at all," he said Friday, speaking before he realized he would need surgery. "I’m not that type of guy to say ‘Oh, I shouldn’t have …’ I did everything did. I missed a game, my wrist is sore it is what it is … I loved the way my weekend went and the break I had after. I had a great time."
Lowry has the power to put the issue in the rearview mirror when he returns. If he can return in good time for the playoffs, pick up where he left off in his career-best season — Lowry’s fourth in the NBA in minutes, fifth in three-pointers made and sixth in the WinShares — and pull the Raptors along on a deep playoff run, his wrist injury and how it was handled will be another footnote in a roller-coaster season.
That’s the beauty of professional sports. Fall short of that? And Lowry and the Raptors will wrestle with the toughest question of all: ‘What might have been?’
