Doc sneakily lays another injury bomb on us
Not to bury the lede here, but we’ll start with the home team. On this week’s edition of Deer Diaries, Riley is joined by Jack to talk about a disappointing 2-2 week (and recorded prior to the Pacers loss). While trying to avoid extrapolating too much from the defeat at the hands of the Cavaliers at the weekend, they did their best to extract some wider lessons about where Milwaukee stands in the East’s pecking order. Is the contrast between Cleveland’s easy breezy offensive flow and Milwaukee’s strained approach the end all, be all? And can the team defense be good enough to make it a moot point? All that, plus the usual miscellaneous topics as they hit rapid fire questions, put a bow on the NBL season, and make weekly predictions.
As we wait on the Hear District crew to return and for the finale of The Damian Lillard Story, we do still have one more from the Bucks+ crew this week, as Gale Klappa does one of his periodic interviews with head coach Doc Rivers. The big scoop here? Doc tells us that the ankle sprain Kyle Kuzma sustained last week, which didn’t cause him to miss any time—he went from doubtful to questionable to starting in about a day—isn’t the only sprain he’s dealing with. At some point, he also sprained his other ankle.
Both are minor, and obviously aren’t keeping him off the floor, but there’s some cruel irony to the fact that the main on-court piece that came back for Khris Middleton, who is still working back from the arthroscopic surgeries on both ankles resulting from two much worse sprains, has two ankle sprains himself. This is frustratingly reminiscent of last July, when Doc mentioned on a Summer League broadcast while chatting with the broadcasters that unbeknownst to us and not made public, Khris Middleton recently underwent surgery. Now, we have him on a podcast saying that Kuzma has another sprained ankle we didn’t know about.
It would be really great if NBA teams were more forthcoming about players’ health to fans, rather than this info only coming out sometimes because a certain coach is more unfiltered than others.
You can also check out these podcasts on the Bucks’ webpage at nba.com/bucks/plus.