Whenever a player goes down on the court grabbing anything at knee level or lower and in obvious pain, your heart sinks. Usually the commentator will go “Oh no…oh no…” as Scott Hastings did here. Since you’re not watching everybody’s ankles and knees in the heat of a play, you don’t know what really happened until you see a replay, so it’s natural to assume the worst.
The good news is that Michael Porter Jr.’s injury doesn’t seem to be too serious. He walked off under his own power. He probably “just” twisted or rolled or sprained his ankle. Sometimes players will come back from an injury like that within the same game. Porter Jr. didn’t accelerate his recovery time quite that drastically, but that’s because the Nuggets didn’t need him around to close out the game. They beat the Bucks by a fair amount even though one of their main scoring threats was in the locker room getting his ankle prodded, dissected, and electroshocked by doctors.
It’s too bad that MPJ didn’t play any more, because he was, as the hip kids say these days, “cooking”. Fifteen points isn’t a lot, but he was scoring in a bunch of different ways, and when a player is doing a bit of everything, it makes it seem like they’re scoring more points than they really are. If I watched this video without knowing beforehand how many points MPJ had scored, I would have thought he had a twenty-burger.
And it should have been a twenty-burger, except for our fragile and pathetic human bodies that are prone to malfunctions.