Raptors All-Star forward Scottie Barnes underwent successful surgery to repair a broken middle finger on his left hand the club announced this week.
Barnes suffered a fractured third metacarpal bone in Friday’s contest vs. the Golden State Warriors after being inadvertently kicked in the hand by Immanuel Quickly on a Jonathan Kuminga layup. The 6’7″ forward immediately checked out of the game and was ruled out indefinitely shortly thereafter.
Barnes flew to Los Angeles to see specialist Dr. Steven Shin who performed the surgery, and expectations are that he’ll make a full recovery. That being said, with the Raptors currently well out of the playoff picture, and the NBA season nearing the homestretch, it now becomes highly unlikely Toronto will be in any rush to get their face of the franchise back on the court this season.
The versatile, do-it-all forward was in the midst of a career year for Toronto averaging 19.9pts/6.1ast/8.2reb/1.3stl/1.5blk per game, while shooting a career best .781 from the free throw line and 34.1% from beyond the arc.
“Obviously when you lose an All-Star player in the game, that definitely changes a lot of things,” Toronto coach Darko Rajakovic following Barnes’ injury. “We tried with different lineups, different players tonight, gave multiple players opportunities there.”
Prior to going down with the injury, the 2022 rookie of the year had put together a streak of 5 consecutive double-doubles before checking out after only 16 minutes on Friday.
With Barnes out indefinitely, and the team’s play-in tournament hopes quickly fading, Toronto could look to provide additional minutes to some of their younger players down the stretch in an effort to see what they bring to the table, while simultaneously increasing their lottery odds.
Toronto is next in action Tuesday night against the New Orleans Pelicans in a 7:30pm ET matchup.
Photo: Erik Drost. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.