Tuesday night in Chicago, two key players for the Bluejays went down with injuries. On Wednesday, the MRI results came back, and both were as close to best-case scenarios as possible.
Doug McDermott, who collided with a DePaul defender while making a cut to the basket, was diagnosed with a sprained AC joint in his left shoulder, and is officially listed as day-to-day. Given what Doug told the media after the game, that’s pretty much what was expected.
“It’s just a minor sprain, and some bruised bones,” Doug said on Wednesday. “With a couple of days off, I’ll be good to go on Sunday.”
While it was the collision in the DePaul game that brought the injury to the forefront, there was another collision in the Seton Hall game that McDermott got up from a little worse for the wear. Asked if the injury might have actually started there, he said, “I was all over the place in that game, and got knocked to the court a lot, so it could have temporarily been messed up there. Last night, I made a cut before the collision and I really felt it crack. I’ve never had an injury to my shoulder before so I didn’t know how to react.”
That collision in the Seton Hall game was on his coach’s mind Wednesday, as well. “Doug’s on the move a lot, and when you’re on the move a lot, you’re going to get chucked. I think he hurt the shoulder at some point during the Seton Hall game, and re-aggrivated it last night.”
He’ll play on Sunday, but the question remains how limited he’ll be. He played the second half against DePaul, but was unable to shoot three-pointers and had trouble even taking jump shots. For his part, McDermott said he believes after a couple of days off to rest, he’ll be good to go. His coach told the media that Doug will sit out of practice on Thursday and Friday, and that he hopes to get him back on the court Saturday so he has one day of preparation before the game Sunday.
Grant Gibbs, on the other hand, suffered a pretty gruesome looking injury to his knee — there was a very real fear that the final moments of him in a Bluejay uniform would be the Fox camera shot in the tunnel of him being carried to the locker room. The MRI showed a dislocated kneecap, with no ligament damage, which is about as good a news as you could hope for. He’s expected to miss four weeks, which means he’ll likely miss six games — Xavier, Butler, Georgetown and St. John’s at home, Providence and Villanova on the road. Suddenly, that strange 10-day gap in between the St. John’s game on January 28 and the DePaul game on February 7 is fortuitous. Instead of missing perhaps 8 or 9 games, or roughly 25% of the season, he could potentially miss just 6 games and come back to face the team he was injured against.
“It’s really good news, considering what they initially thought,” Gibbs said in a video posted to GoCreighton.com on Wednesday. “I’m looking at four to five weeks of recovery, but hopefully it will be sooner than that.”
He told Steve Pivovar of the Omaha World-Herald that he’d have to wait for the swelling to go down before he could start rehab work, but that he’s played through injuries before so he hopes to come back sooner. “I’m going to work on what I need to do to get back, and hopefully I can get back before I’m expected to.” Gibbs added that in high school, he came back from a wrist injury two weeks sooner than expected, so he hopes for a similar result here.
“It’s bad, but it’s better than a career-ending injury,” Gibbs said in a tweet relayed by Pivovar. “I didn’t sleep last night. I knew it was bad, and it was pretty tough to take. I didn’t celebrate at the news, but it’s better than it could have been.”
