One of the Portland Trail Blazers’ most pleasant early-season surprises will be sidelined for the foreseeable future.
Backup point guard Blake Wesley, who has quietly emerged as a menacing key figure in the team’s relentless full-court pressure defense, suffered a fracture in the fifth metatarsal of his right foot during the team’s Friday night win over the Denver Nuggets.
The Blazers said a timeline for his return will be “determined at a later date,” so he will be sidelined indefinitely.
Wesley suffered the injury with 3:52 left in the first half against the Nuggets after swishing a fadeaway 16-foot jumper. He crashed to the floor awkwardly after the shot and did not get up as action sprinted the other way and Aaron Gordon scored on a dunk. Play stopped after Gordon’s finish and Blazers trainers immediately tended to Wesley.
He limped off the floor under his own power, but did not return in the second half.
After the game, Wesley declined to offer details about his injury, saying he would know more “this weekend.” Subsequent medical testing confirmed the fracture to the long bone on the outside of the foot that connects to the little toe.
For a team playing without point guard Scoot Henderson, who suffered a left hamstring tear days before training camp, and backup guard Matisse Thybulle, who underwent surgery Friday morning to repair a tear of the ulnar collateral ligament in his left thumb, Wesley’s injury is a blow.
After turning heads in training camp with his full-court pressure defense and all-out effort, Wesley has emerged as a fun and important secondary piece of the Blazers’ rotation. He’s averaging 6.0 points, 3.2 assists, 2.3 rebounds and 1.7 steals per game, and his baseline-to-baseline defense has frustrated everyone from James Harden to Christian Braun. Wesley has recorded multiple steals in five of his six games this season and his full-court pressure has caused more than one eight-second violation.
Few players have embodied the Blazers’ identity — playing defense, playing fast and playing hard — more than Wesley early this season.
“I love Blake,” Deni Avdija said last week in Los Angeles. “I love how he plays. I love his intensity. And we need him. We need him. We need this from him. He’s hyping us all up, and he sets the standard for sure.”
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