Lonzo Ball is headed back to the shelf as the Chicago Bulls announced on Tuesday that the guard suffered a right wrist sprain in the first quarter of Chicago’s win over Memphis on Monday. Ball will be re-evaluated in 10 days, which means he will miss at least five games.
Over that stretch, the Bulls will face Orlando, Brooklyn, Utah, Dallas and Minnesota.
Thankfully this doesn’t sound like anything too serious. The 27-year-old Ball actually kept playing in the game and had an effective stretch in the fourth quarter in which he dished out three 3-point assists over 90 seconds as the Bulls won their first game of the season.
Still, any injury news for Ball is troubling. This is a guy whose career was all but over. He’s missed the last two and a half seasons and nearly three calendar years, having last played in January 2022.
Over that time he endured three knee surgeries, the last being a cartilage transplant from a cadaver, a rare procedure for which there isn’t a single successful case of recovery by an NBA player. Festus Ezeli had it done in 2017 and never played in the league again.
Ball has already beat the odds by making it back in the first place, and on top of that he has played well. The numbers certainly won’t jump off the page: 4.7 points, 3.7 assists, 2.7 rebounds in a little over 15 minutes a night, but he has arguably been Chicago’s best player when he’s been on the floor.
It’s not something numbers alone can quantify. The ball and game as a whole just move differently when Ball is out there. It’s not an accident that he has registered a positive point differential in each of the Bulls’ first three games.
On Monday, Chicago outscored Memphis by a team-high 16 points when Ball was on the court and lost the non-Ball minutes by 13. Even in a 19-point loss to the Thunder, Ball was still a plus-3 for that game; he was the only Bulls player who played over four minutes and registered a positive point differential in that game. Similarly, in a 12-point loss to the Pelicans on opening night, Ball was still a plus-4 in his 14 minutes, meaning the Bulls were outscored by 16 points when he sat.
Single-game plus-minus numbers and even three-game samples are always noisy, particularly on low minutes, but if you watch the Bulls play it’s not a surprise that they are winning the scoreboard when Ball is on the court.
Though he has been on a minutes restriction, these impact numbers track, and it stinks that just when he was getting back into a groove he is headed right back to the sideline. Let’s just hope it stays at the 10 days and doesn’t turn into something more.
