The Nets will be extremely short-handed when they visit Indiana on Saturday for the second half of a back-to-back set. As Ian Begley of SNY.tv reports, Brooklyn has ruled out eight players, including their entire regular starting lineup.
Kevin Durant (right knee injury management), Kyrie Irving (left adductor tightness), Ben Simmons (left knee/calf injury management), Royce O’Neale (personal reasons), Joe Harris (left ankle injury management), Seth Curry (left ankle injury management), Nic Claxton (right hamstring tightness) and T.J. Warren (left foot injury management) will all be unavailable for the Nets.
Those are eight of Brooklyn’s top nine players in terms of minutes per game, so we could see some wonky lineups from the team on Saturday night. The ninth player on that list, Yuta Watanabe, is set to make his return after missing 10 games due to a hamstring injury, so the Nets will likely be hesitant to push him too hard in his first game back.
Here are a few more injury updates from around the NBA:
- After returning from a nine-game injury absence on Friday, Jazz guard Mike Conley will sit out Saturday’s game against Denver, per Tony Jones of The Athletic. Conley didn’t suffer a setback on Friday. This is a planned rest game to ease him back into things following his knee injury, Jones explains.
- Having already missed seven games due to a right shoulder subluxation, Timberwolves forward Taurean Prince is expected to be out for at least one more week, head coach Chris Finch said on Friday. As Dane Moore of Blue Wire Pods notes, Prince is doing on-court work and making progress, but still has a ways to go.
- Grizzlies center Steven Adams had a Pistons player roll into his ankle while he was trying to corral a defensive rebound in the fourth quarter of Friday’s game, writes Evan Barnes of the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Adams, who limped off the court and didn’t return, will be reevaluated this weekend, but he said after the game that he felt OK, per Barnes. Memphis isn’t back in action until Monday, so Adams will have at least a couple of days off to rest the ankle.
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