Last week, after the Jays exhibition opener, I extolled the virtues of exhibition games — the chance to work out the kinks against real competition in a game that doesn’t count, the opportunity for coaches to experiment with substitution patterns, etc. On Sunday, we saw a ghastly reminder of the downside to exhibition games — losing perhaps your most important player to a serious injury in a meaningless game.
It’s difficult to imagine a worse outcome than that. A loss on the scoreboard would have led to two or three days of ribbing from UNO fans. A win on the scoreboard would have led to Creighton fans melting down on message boards about rebounding and defense. Either scenario is not THAT big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. But losing the only consistent rebounder on a team already worried about rebounding, who just happens to be the vocal leader of the team, to a knee injury?
That wasn’t in the script. Says here UNO was supposed to come in, give the Jays a competitive game, put on a good show for the fans, and after a CU win, wish each other luck and head into the regular season. Instead, on a gorgeous 70-degree November afternoon when the smallish-crowd might have wished they were outside, the Jays played ragged for 10 minutes, used a nice run over the next 10 minutes to take a lead, played steady-if-unspectacular over the next 10 minutes to build that lead…and then lost Justin Carter to a knee injury early in the last 10 minutes.
It happened right in front of where I sit in 113, and let me tell you, it was heinous. A guy who sits in front of me called it “gruesome”, which is a great word that I have neglected for too long but will be adding back into my vocabulary rotation pronto. Essentially what happened is Carter caught the ball on the wing, turned to make a cut, and slipped on a wet court. The slippage caused him to do the splits, with his left knee bending in a direction its not supposed to bend. Was it condensation from the hockey ice below the court, caused by the unseasonably warm day outside? Or merely sweat? It doesn’t really matter either way, because regardless of where the moisture came from, the Jays most indispensable player is out indefinitely.
I’m no doctor, and its been so long since I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express that any lingering effects of “temporary smarts” have worn off, but his knee has to have ligament damage of some sort. A knee just can’t bend that way without damaging ligaments. Consulting WebMD, if its his ACL, he’s done for the year and has 4-6 months of rehab ahead of him. If its his MCL, he’s got 3-5 weeks of rehab of him. So assuming the best-case scenario, the earliest Carter could come back seems to be the Nebraska game on December 6. Before then, the Jays play at Dayton, and in the Old Spice Classic against Michigan, et al down in Orlando. In other words, if you had to pick a worse time to miss 3-5 weeks, you couldn’t do it.
As for the rest of the game, it looked again like an exhibition game. Their rebounding and passing could have been better, but again, those are things that are hard to gauge in an exhibition. One thing I will note is that after they fell behind by 10 points, the team did an Apollo Creed and figured out they had a fight on their hands — and promptly went on a 13-0 run over the next couple of minutes.
The only thing we can really take out of these two exhibition games is that, win or lose, this will be the most athletic Jays team any of us have ever seen. The defense may or may not improve when the games are real. The rebounding may or may not improve when the games count. But the team will run, pass and shoot like no other Jays team in memory, and it should be fun to watch.
Polyfro Gameball: Antoine Young had an outstanding game — 9 points, 9 assists and 3 steals. If you thought you could get that from your starting point guard every night, would you be giddy? I would be. Heckuva game. You bet.