Anthony Davis, looking to avoid surgery (that he may need to have this offseason anyway), has been resting a stress reaction in his foot and says the pain has gone down, but an MRI next week will tell more about how things are going and when he might return.
“I mean, it’s feeling a lot better. The pain has subsided tremendously,” Davis said, adding he didn’t want to put a timetable on things. He will get another MRI on his foot when the Lakers return to Los Angeles (the Lakers play in Charlotte on Monday and then return home), and that’s when the next steps will be decided. Davis said there is still a little pain in his foot but he was optimistic about a return sooner rather than later.
This was the first time since he went out of a game against the Nuggets on Dec. 16 that Davis sat down with the media (doing so on the road in Atlanta, where there were fewer L.A. media) and detailed the injury, and discussed his recovery time.
Davis said he had a bone spur on his navicular bone — a small connective bone on the top of the foot close to the ankle joint — that fractured and caused a stress reaction in the navicular bone itself. He added that the bone spur (a bony projection that can grow on the edge of a bone) wasn’t as much the problem as the stress reaction.
Anthony Davis scored 10 PTS in 17 MINS before leaving the game with a right foot injury. pic.twitter.com/cIa4ivrFYw
— Ballislife.com (@Ballislife) December 17, 2022
“I honestly didn’t feel anything at all, for the whole season. Then, even before the [Denver] game, you know, warming up, nothing was alarming in my foot,” Davis said of the injury. “And then that one move, I guess kind of caused it whatever it caused and... the doctor told me that I had a fracture in a bone spur in my foot.
“And then the next day, he told me that I had a stress reaction in my navicular bone. So I was kind of dealing with two problems and it comes from that piece, the bone spur kind of just continuously hitting the navicular bone, causing the stress on itself. Which is more alarming for me than the bone spur because a stress reaction leads to stress fracture. And then as a whole different ballgame.”
Davis hinted he could need to have the bone spur removed this summer, but his goal for the season was to avoid surgery (and the lengthy recovery time that follows).
Davis had been playing the best basketball of his career before going down, a clear All-NBA candidate averaging 27.4 points, 12.1 rebounds and 2.1 blocked shots per game. His name had even come up as one that could land on the MVP ballot after his play sparked a 10-6 Lakers run in weeks before his current injury.
The Lakers are 3-5 with Davis out.
“I think our main thing is defensively, we took a huge dip defensively,” Davis said. “I think maybe three games in a row we gave up like 130. You know, which is not us, which is not the same team we’ve been.”
The Lakers are 15-21 and sit 13th in the West. If they are going to make any run into the postseason they need Davis back.