Portland Trail Blazers big man Meyers Leonard will undergo surgery for his recently dislocated left shoulder and will miss the remainder of the season, the team announced Thursday evening.
This also adds another wrinkle to what was already shaping up to be an interesting summer for Leonard and the Blazers.
Leonard suffered his second dislocation of the season in practice during the team’s road trip.
Leonard left the road trip early and got a second opinion in Los Angeles on his left shoulder. He dislocated it back in November, missed over two weeks and lost his starting spot.
Surgery was scheduled for Friday in Los Angeles by Dr. Neal ElAttrache at the Kerlan-Job Orthopaedic Clinic. The Blazers did not reveal all of the damage that Leonard has in his shoulder in the press release and said that a prognosis for Leonard’s return would be made after the procedure.
The loss is a major blow to the Blazers, even if losing a back-up big man seems like a minimal loss on the surface.
Leonard has consistently been a weapon against the game’s best centers and while teams are downsizing across the league, the Blazers face enough talented big men that they need a counter.
Leonard gave them a dimension that no other big man on their roster could with his ability to shoot the ball as well as neutralize good centers with his size not get pushed around on the block and the shooting threat to pull them away from the basket.
In two of the next four games, all of which are coming at home, the Blazers are scheduled to face Sacramento’s DeMarcus Cousins, whom Leonard has neutralized a few times this season, and Miami’s Hassan Whiteside, a strong defender.
Leonard will be a restricted free agent at the end of the season and while there’s never a good time for surgery, this is an especially crucial time in Leonard’s career. He and the Blazers did not agree to a contract extension before the season started.
Leonard averaged a career-highs of 22 minutes, 8.4 points and 5.1 rebounds per game. He shot a pretty solid 37.7 percent from long-range on the season, as well.
The Blazers started Moe Harkless on Wednesday against the Mavericks and Thursday’s buzzer-beating loss to the Clippers.
Noah Vonleh, who replaced Leonard in the starting lineup earlier in the season, is coming off the bench.
Although head coach Terry Stotts downplayed the significance of the switch and doesn’t want to commit publicly to starting Harkless, the eye test and the numbers make it look like the right path to stay on.
After Thursday night’s loss, the net-rating for the current starting lineup of Damian Lillard, CJ McCollum, Harkless, Al-Farouq Aminu and Mason Plumlee improved to 15.6 points per 100 possessions according to NBA.com.
Stotts doesn’t want anybody on the scent of what he’s thinking and his desire to not name this the lineup moving forward is a reflection of that.
But the more the lineup plays together, the clearer it becomes that the Blazers have found the optimum starting lineup.
“I think it changes the dynamic,” Harkless said after Wednesday’s win over Dallas.
