After missing the last two games for the Los Angeles Lakers with what the team deemed a shoulder injury, the Lakers announced that further testing had revealed that Brandon Ingram has Deep Venous Thrombosis (DVT). He will miss the rest of the season.
This is a scary injury for Ingram, as DVT is better known by a more common term: blood clots. With an issue like this, surgery is possible, and if the clot theoretically were to dislodge, it could lead to more far more serious side effects than the pain Ingram is experiencing, side effects that could include a heart attack or stroke.
Those are not the most common outcomes, but still, the list of players who have suffered from DVT is a little scary, and before even thinking about basketball, we should all just be hoping that Ingram is okay health-wise:
As stated above, basketball is pretty trivial when discussing an issue like this, but it’s hard not to feel even worse for Ingram that this happened while he was in the midst of (by far) the best basketball of his career, averaging 25.6 points, 6.9 rebounds and 2.5 assists on a blistering 64.5 true-shooting percentage over his last 10 games.
There are very few players that want to be great more than Ingram does. The third-year forward is often an incredibly harsh critic of himself, and over his three years with the Lakers, anyone who has covered him consistently has become well aware of how genuinely morose he is after losses, no matter how he played individually.
Again, basketball isn’t what’s important here, but hopefully this is just a road-bump for Ingram, and he’s able to use the rest of the season and summer to get fully healthy and back to the level he’s fought so hard to reach.
For more Lakers talk, subscribe to the Silver Screen and Roll podcast feed on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or Google Podcasts. All stats per NBA.com and Basketball-Reference.com. You can follow Harrison on Twitter at @hmfaigen.
using WordPress and