As the Portland Trail Blazers and Brooklyn Nets engaged in a double-overtime game on Monday night, the Blazers' Jusuf Nurkic suffered a gruesome left leg injury on a simple basketball play.
As the Blazers big man was coming down after jumping for an offensive rebound, he came down on his left leg in a very awkward manner, apparently suffering a severely broken left leg.
We are not posting the video in the story but it can be seen here in the highlights of the Blazers win over the Nets, and a warning, the video of the injury is very graphic.
Nurkic was immediately stretchered off of the floor. Blazers and Nets players immediately recognized how bad the injury was by immediately turning their heads and walking away.
This injury will bring up memories of the Gordon Hayward injury from 2017 and the Paul George injury from 2014. While those injuries were clearly gruesome like this one, there was a clear cause and effect. Hayward suffered his injury in part due to contact while jumping up in mid-air at his apex. In George's case, the scaffold underneath the basket is what led to his injury.
In Nurkic's case, this type of injury on a common basketball play is uncommon. It didn't look as if anybody made contact with him him in mid air -- he just came down on his left leg in the wrong fashion.
Nurkic is in the midst of the best season of his career. The 24-year-old has posted career-highs with 15.4 points and 10.3 rebounds per game while starting all of the 71 games he had appeared in at center for the team this season.
However, the basketball side of the equation is not important at all right now -- it's Nurkic's health and his long road to recovery from this unfortunate injury.
