The 2020-21 season has unfortunately gone the way many recent seasons have for the Portland Trail Blazers, with injuries piling up to some of their top players leaving Terry Stotts to shuffle his rotations to try and piece together a winner around Damian Lillard.
Jusuf Nurkić suffered a wrist fracture last week in a game against the Pacers, which will sideline the starting big man for eight weeks as he heals and rehabs his way back. Over the weekend, even more bad news arrived when CJ McCollum left Portland’s win over Atlanta with what was initially diagnosed as a sprained left foot, but further testing and another MRI revealed a hairline fracture that will keep McCollum in a boot for the next four weeks before he is re-evaluated.
INJURY UPDATE: Further imaging reveals CJ McCollum with a small hairline fracture to the lateral cuneiform in his left foot and a mid-foot sprain. McCollum will wear a walking boot and be re-evaluated in four weeks.
— Portland Trail Blazers (@trailblazers) January 19, 2021
One would assume that his absence will extend beyond that four-week timeframe, as that’s simply when they’ll reconvene with McCollum and the doctors to check in on his progress and hope to see it healed or nearly healed. From there he could need additional time for rehab or at least conditioning to work his way back into basketball shape. In any case, Portland having to navigate the next month-plus without the services of their second and third stars is far from ideal and they’ll have to cobble together a completely different rotation in order to try and tread water and stay attached to the playoff picture in the West.