Last week, when the Los Angeles Lakers misplaced to the defending NBA champion Oklahoma City Thunder by 43 factors, Luka Dončić and Austin Reaves suffered accidents that can preserve them out at the least by means of the rest of the common season.
Five days later, the Lakers are taking up the Western Conference-leading Thunder once more, and this time they received’t even have LeBron James within the lineup.
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James, who’s managing a left foot injury, will miss Tuesday night time’s showdown in L.A., the Lakers announced hours before tip-off.
ESPN’s Dave McMenamin reported that, extra particularly, James is dealing with left foot soreness. L.A. has already clinched the Pacific Division title and a spot within the playoffs. At 50-28, the Lakers are presently fourth within the West. They’re solely a half-game again of the Denver Nuggets, whom they maintain a tiebreaker over.
L.A. has 4 regular-season video games remaining. That consists of Tuesday’s game versus the Thunder, which marks the primary of three video games in 4 nights for JJ Redick’s injury-riddled squad.
Dončić is nursing a left hamstring strain, and the Slovenian superstar is reportedly in Europe seeking specialized medical treatment to hurry up his restoration from a setback that interrupted an MVP-caliber marketing campaign. In his first full season with the Lakers, Dončić has posted a league-leading 33.5 factors per game. He went off in March, averaging 37.5 throughout the month, however now he has to attend and see if he’ll even be eligible for the NBA’s end-of-season awards.
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Since he completed one game shy of the league’s 65-game minimal for these honors, Dončić’s camp utilized for an “Extraordinary Circumstances Challenge,” citing the two games he missed for the birth of his second child.
Dončić’s injury prognosis is a Grade 2 hamstring pressure, and he’s out indefinitely in the mean time. Reaves, in the meantime, is working his method again from a Grade 2 indirect pressure and is reportedly anticipated to overlook four-to-six weeks. Like Dončić, Reaves has loved a profession 12 months in 2025-26. He’s averaging 23.3 factors, 5.5 assists and 4.7 rebounds per contest.
Dončić and Reaves are the Lakers’ high scorers this season. James is third on that leaderboard. After a 134-128 defeat to the Dallas Mavericks on Sunday, the 41-year-old described the intestine verify he skilled when studying his teammates’ injury information.
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“It was a shot to the heart obviously and to the chest and to the mainframe with Luka,” James stated, through McMenamin. “We got that news kind of quick. … AR was kind of dealing with the [oblique] pain. … We knew he was going to get an MRI, but, yeah, I woke up from my nap yesterday and then saw that news, and I was like, ‘S***.’”
Now James, too, shall be out of the Lakers’ lineup for their newest bout with the Thunder.
James, a 22-time All-Star in his NBA-record twenty third season, has appeared in 57 video games this season. He missed the primary 14 with sciatica, a ache that travels alongside the sciatic nerve, which runs from the decrease again, by means of the glute and down the leg.
