Sunday marks the return of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander following a five-game absence. Considering what Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault said about his return, don’t expect him to play his usual workload the rest of the way.
Daigneault noted that while Gilgeous-Alexander is back with the Thunder, his abdominal strain will be a tricky injury the team will have to manage during the remaining 19 games of the regular season.
Daigneault mentioned the possibility of resting Gilgeous-Alexander on back-to-backs as well as decreasing his minutes. The Thunder have three remaining back-to-back games on their schedule. Daigneault said if the strain had occurred earlier in the season, they’d likely opt for completely resting him until it was fully healed.
However, with just 19 games left, they’ll give it a go and see how Gilgeous-Alexander responds to playing with it.
Here’s Daigneault’s full quote when asked about Gilgeous-Alexander:
“The missed time was health and safety protocols. We were prepared to manage him with the (abdominal strain). The (abdominal strain) is a tricky area. … It’s a situation where if this happened earlier in the season, the (solution) for it is rest. So if this was October, we would be resting him and getting it completely healed. It’s not October, we only have (19) games left. So what we’re going to do is manage it, which will be a little bit tricky, and it’s going to require us modifying some things. So we’re going to have to look at back-to-back’s and we’re going to have to look at his rotation. So you’re gonna see a little bit of a different approach on our end of things with him. Starting tonight, rotationally, he’s typically playing long stretches of minutes in the first and third (quarters) — that’ll change tonight and will probably change moving forward and then we just have to see how he responds. And like I said, we’re also going to have to look at how condensed the schedule is at opportunities to do injury maintenance when necessary. That’s the best we can do right now with the circumstances but we’re happy to have him back.”
