The star of the surgery/” title=”Damian Lillard (abdominal injury) plans to have surgery”>Portland Trail Blazers, Damian Lillard, stresses this Saturday that he will not rush his return to the courts after undergoing surgery to remedy a .
The point guard revealed that he has not spoken with management about the possibility of sitting out the rest of the season if the team decides to prioritize their draft positioning. However, he likely won’t be back if Portland decides to go that route.
“No, we haven’t gone that far,” he declares. “I am a week away from surgery. And we have said that we will re-evaluate my situation weeks later, six to eight weeks, and we will talk about it then,” he adds.
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“If we’re going to play for a draft pick it wouldn’t make sense for me (to come back) … because I’m not going to play for any draft pick,” the 31-year-old says. “I’m just not capable of that, so that would be for the best – if that’s what we were doing or what was decided, then it wouldn’t make sense for me to play,” he says.
Entering Saturday, Portland is 19-26 and occupies the final play-in spot in the Western Conference. Yet they are almost as close to the bottom spot in the West as they are to a top-six spot, 4 1/2 games behind the sixth-seeded Denver Nuggets but just six ahead of the bottom-seeded Houston Rockets.
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Lillard adds that he can’t remember when he started playing with the abdominal discomfort, but notes that the pain reached its “peak” while he was with Team USA at the Tokyo Olympics. The pain temporarily subsided after a few weeks of rest, but then returned.
He is averaging 24 points per game this season — his lowest scoring mark since his third season — with a career-low 32.4 3-point percentage through the first 29 games of his 10th season.
In 10 games without their star, the Trail Blazers have gone 6-4.
Source: The Score
