WASHINGTON – The right knee wasn’t improving, the discomfort wasn’t going away, so Javonte Green felt like Wednesday would be the right time.
After all, the Bulls go to Paris next week and play just one game, and then soon after that will be the All-Star Break. If there was a good moment to get a quick clean-up surgery, why not now?
“He obviously had that bone bruise, which was causing him some problems,’’ Bulls coach Billy Donovan said of his forward. “He did swell from it. Medical guys thought that this was something that could be managed if we backed off of him. They had a bunch of different therapies that they could try and do. They did that, there really wasn’t much progress after doing that for a week.
“Given Javonte’s options with where we’re at in the season … obviously it was Javonte’s decision to do it, but I didn’t think from what I got from medical, and even what I got from Javonte, that there was a lot of progress with the interaction of just resting him.’’
It doesn’t hurt that Green had the surgery in also one of the weaker stretches of the season schedule-wise. He’ll now be re-evaluated in two weeks, and the initial thoughts were he’d miss about a month total.
Just another player who his teammates would love to have on the court, but like point guard Lonzo Ball, is now out of sight, out of mind.
While there were no updates with Ball (left knee) before the Wizards game, veteran players like Nikola Vucevic know the reality of the situation was carrying on like he won’t be back at all this season. There’s no reason to dwell on what ifs with the season officially halfway over.
“You wish you had everybody, but whenever guys are missing time – whether it’s a short time or long – you just have to figure out things without him,’’ Vucevic said. “That’s part of it. Obviously, we know what Lonzo brings to this team and how much he would help us, but we haven’t had him since the beginning, so we can’t think about, ‘Oh, when he gets back, we’ll be so and so …’
“We have to play now, we have to figure it out now. You don’t play thinking about that. We still have a lot of very good players on this team and ways to be good even with guys missing.’’
Batman sits
Team leader DeMar DeRozan missed his first game of the season, sitting with that injured right quadriceps against the Wizards.
The hope was it wasn’t anything serious, but the medical staff just wanted to be cautious with the leading scorer.
“Anytime it’s a strain like that, he’s going to want to – and medical too – just making sure it’s something that will linger on, that he re-aggravates and it sets him back even further,’’ Donovan said. “He still has some discomfort there. We don’t feel like it’s a major strain or a major tear, anything like that.
“I think they’ll keep progressing him and pushing him, see how he responds. But he’s still sore from the other day.’’
DeRozan had been dealing with the quadriceps for a few weeks, but further injured it in a third quarter fall against the Celtics.
The last game DeRozan sat out because of injury was Mar. 24 of last season. He did miss the regular-season finale in Minnesota, but that was a rest day for all the veteran starters because it was meaningless.
