The Los Angeles Lakers’ championship hopes — as faint as they were in reality — seemed to evaporate fully on April 2 when Luka Doncic suffered a Grade 2 hamstring strain in a blowout loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder. At the time, it was estimated that it could take him at least four to six weeks to heal enough to return to game action.
In his first public comments since sustaining that injury, Doncic admitted how frustrated he is about having to sit and watch, per ESPN.
“It’s very frustrating,” Doncic, speaking for the first time since the injury occurred, told reporters in a meeting room at the team hotel. “I don’t think people understand how frustrating it is. All I want to do is play basketball, especially this time. It’s the best time to play basketball.
“It’s very frustrating seeing what my team is doing. I’m very proud of them. It’s been very tough to just to sit and watch them play.”
Without him, the Lakers upset the Houston Rockets in the first round of the playoffs and lost to the Thunder in Game 1 of the second round. They have struggled offensively, as they haven’t scored more than 107 points in regulation in any playoff game so far this year.
Doncic also admitted that when he first suffered the injury, his doctor gave him a longer timeline than the standard generic one for a Grade 2 hamstring strain.
“The day I did the MRI on the hamstring, the doctor told me eight weeks [recovery] at the beginning,” Doncic said. “I’m doing everything I can in the process, and I think we’re on a good way. But at the beginning, he told me eight weeks.”
It has now been nearly five weeks since he suffered the injury, and he still doesn’t appear to be close to returning. He said he has started running, but that he hasn’t done any contact work yet.
He said he spent a good deal of time in Spain getting multiple PRP injections in an attempt to speed up his recovery.
“I went to Spain to do PRP,” Doncic said. “Obviously, everybody knows that it’s one of the best countries to do that. And obviously we talked with the Lakers doctors, everybody agreed for me to go there. Obviously I know a lot of people from Spain that I used to work with before.
“But why I was in Spain so long was because I needed four days in between every shot. I did it four times, so that’s why I stayed longer.”
The timing of Doncic’s injury was obviously terrible. The Lakers had just won 16 of their previous 18 games, and they were starting to be talked about as perhaps a dark-horse candidate for the NBA championship.
He had a sensational regular season in which he led the league in scoring average and put up 33.5 points, 7.7 rebounds, 8.3 assists and 1.6 steals a game. There is no replacing that type of production, and that reality can be seen during every one of L.A.’s possessions, as the team has had to work a lot harder to manufacture points.
This article originally appeared on LeBron Wire: Luka Doncic speaks to media for first time since hamstring injury
Reporting by Robert Marvi, LeBron Wire / LeBron Wire
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
