While the Raptors have slowly been reclaiming players off the IL, slowly working their way back to health, they’re still short of it.
The Raptors have announced that Gradey Dick, Bruce Brown, Kelly Olynyk, and Immanuel Quickley are all OUT for Friday’s game against the Heat.
Just to recap, this will be Dick’s 3rd missed game in a row with a left calf contusion. For Brown, he is recovering from knee surgery prior to the season and is still getting conditioned for his return, although he is a full participant in practices. Olynyk has been sidelined with a back injury for some time now and it has been of the “play it by ear” variety, as he’s not a young player and back injuries are tricky. Quickley has the most severe injury at this point and the Raptors are just waiting to see how his body responds to everything before they announce a timeline.
With Quickley & Dick being out, in particular, it puts stress on the Scottie Barnes & Jakob Poeltl led actions, as the Raptors can’t run their pet play ’77 Shallow’ effectively without their two movement shooters. Ja’Kobe Walter has stepped up admirably in everyone’s absence, but he doesn’t have the same pull.
Esfandiar Baraheni will have some coverage on Bruce Brown’s return and what that might look like in the coming days, and his work is always terrific so I’m looking forward to that.
The Raptors have tried out a few different starting lineups with all the injuries ongoing, but it should be interesting to see if Davion Mitchell can still carve out a healthy amount of time, as he’s lost a few minutes to the likes of Jamal Shead lately – although this could be the precursor to Shead heading down to the 905 soon, and the Raptors giving him some NBA run before he checks down to the G. We’ll see.
Have a blessed day.
