Greenburgh, N.Y. – Welcome to beautiful Westchester, where a sprained ankle needing “days, not weeks” to heal can turn into a 4-to-6 week bone bruise – maybe even a stress fracture – before you know it.
That was the mostly bad news that came out today about David Lee, who not only has a bone bruise in his right leg but also must have incurred serious internal injuries from throwing himself under the bus.
We kid, because we care. But seriously, Lee’s prognosis was proved to be significantly worse after he received a second opinion from Dr. David Porter in Indianapolis yesterday. Lee could miss 3-4 more weeks, putting him dangerously close to missing the rest of the regular season, with what a CT scan proved is “something in between a bad bone bruise and a stress fracture.”
Lee initially was told by the Knicks’ medical staff that the injury he sustained from landing on Milwaukee center Andrew Bogut’s foot on Feb. 23 was a high ankle sprain that would keep him out for “days, not weeks.”
After practice today, Lee spent as much time defending the Knicks’ medical staff and blaming himself for his slow recovery as he did talking about the injury itself.
And unfortunately for the Knicks, who desperately need Lee’s rebounding and energy off the bench to hold onto the eighth playoff spot, the prognosis could get even worse before this is over. Porter, orthopedic consultant to the Indianapolis Colts, Indiana University, and Purdue University, is still reviewing Lee’s MRI results.
“The doctor in Indianapolis said that, in his opinion, it could be as much as 3-4 [more] weeks before I was back seeing action,” Lee said. “Although he’s still looking at the MRI’s today, he saw the CT scan that I had as well as the X-rays, and said that he would classify it as something in between a bad bone bruise and a stress fracture.
“Now don’t hear the stress fracture part and go there. It’s more so that you could possibly be classified somewhere similar to a stress reaction. I don’t believe it’s going to be a full stress fracture – and they’re still looking at the MRI – but it’s more going to be along the lines of a stress reaction, something that is similar to a bad bone bruise, and it’s just going to be time that’s going to heal it.”
Lee said Porter indicated that none of the shooting and conditioning work he’s been doing since the injury have hurt his recovery, that there will be no limitations on what he’ll be able to do once he comes back, and that there’s little risk of re-injuring the leg.
“He said basically from when this happened, it’s a 4-6 week injury and it’s been about 2 1-2 weeks,” Lee said.
He said Dr. Lisa Callahan, the Knicks’ director of player care, “apologized that it’s not going to be healed as quick as we had hoped. I said, ‘If you had told me when I came down on it that it was going to be 4-6 weeks, I would have laughed at you anyway. There was no point in telling me that because I wouldn’t have believed it anyway.”
That is significantly different from what Lee said Saturday in Washington, D.C., when he expressed frustration that the leg wasn’t responding after being told it the recovery process would be “day-to-day.”
“What’s been tough is, so far I think I’ve been continuing to test it every day and irritate it over and over, and I don’t think that has been helping the recovery because it hasn’t gotten much better,” Lee said on Saturday, before the seventh consecutive game he’s missed with the injury. “… If they would have said at the start, ‘I think it’s going to be four weeks or so,’ then we wouldn’t have been in this situation.”
After he said today that the initial prognosis and the one he received from Porter in Indianapolis were “very similar,”
I asked Lee if it was true that a day-to-day high ankle sprain and a 4-to-6 week bone bruise are, in fact, quite different.
“It is completely different,” Lee said. “And part of that, I’m going to put on my shoulders for trying to be optimistic because this is new territory to me. … Some injuries they tell you two months and it’s a couple of days, and some injuries, it goes the opposite way. So I can’t blame them for that.”
Lee did some bike work and jogging today without pain and continued to work on his shooting. He said Porter told him he could start thinking about returning to play once he can stand 10-15 minutes on the treadmill without “significant pain.”
“I mean, I realize that when I come back to play for us this season, I’m probably going to be playing in pain, but I’m not concerned about that,” Lee said. “The thing that I’m concerned about is that the leg is healed and that I can stand going out there and doing the things that I need to do to help this team.”