2. He’s injury prone
At this point of Lonzo Ball’s career, we have to be honest: it seems like he’s made of glass.
In his rookie season, he sprained his shoulder and missed six games. He also had two separate knee injuries. The first one, a sprained MCL, sidelined him for 15 games, while the second one, originally diagnosed as a knee contusion, caused him to miss the last eight games of the Lakers’ season.
That second knee injury turned out to be more serious than thought. When it didn’t respond to rest during the offseason, he ended up having arthroscopic surgery on it, which is a bad sign when you’re just 20-year-old.
This past season, his body was holding up pretty well, until he suffered a sprained ankle in Houston in January. What looked like an injury that may keep him out for a few weeks ultimately kept him out for the entire rest of the season, a total of 35 games.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard of an NBA player missing that many games for merely spraining his ankle. Maybe it’s happened before, but it has to be rare. After all, this is a sport where players sprain their ankles pretty often, and they usually only miss a few games, or at most a couple weeks afterwards.
When a player that some Lakers fans were convinced was a future star or Hall of Famer can’t stay on the court for much more than half a season, it’s a major problem. At some point, he may suffer an injury that not only keeps him out for months, but may even threaten the rest of his career, or at least his viability as an impact player.
Maybe it’s not really his fault. Some NBA players simply weren’t built for the rigors of the league’s brutal schedule and frenetic pace. The Lakers know about that after having dealt with Andrew Bynum, and I’m sure many of you remember Greg Oden.
Some of you who are more experienced than me can also recall the injury-riddled careers of guys like Bill Walton and Andrew Toney, who were great when they were healthy but were injured more often than they were available to play.