Los Angeles Lakers star Anthony Davis left their 127-117 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves early on Sunday night after he exacerbated an eye injury.
Davis took an unintended shot to the face from Timberwolves forward Kyle Anderson late in the very first quarter of the video game at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. Davis got a rebound and was choosing a put-back dunk when Anderson reached his eye. While Davis finished the dunk, he struck the flooring hard after and was plainly in discomfort.
Davis left the video game due to the injury, and the group then ruled him out in the 2nd half with a left eye injury. He completed with 4 points and 4 rebounds in 12 minutes.
The hit to his eye worsened a corneal abrasion he initially sustained in a loss to the Golden State Warriors last month after Trayce Jackson-Davis struck him in the eye. Davis left the video game early that night, too, and he saw an expert after his vision suffered and his eyelid was inflamed shut.
“I simply could not see,” Davis stated last month, through ESPN's Dave McMenamin. “The corneal abrasion was in fact best in the middle of my eye. It wasn't like off to the side. Anytime I looked it was fuzzy. My eye was inflamed. I believed my eye resembled, [torn] open. It wasn't. It kept watering. It simply seemed like sand remained in my eye.”
While it's uncertain how extreme the injury is, there is “optimism” that Davis will have the ability to return for the Lakers' next video game on Tuesday night, according to McMenamin.
Without Davis and LeBron James– who was dismissed with flu-like signs– the Timberwolves rolled past the Lakers on Sunday night. They outscored the Lakers by 19 points in the 2nd quarter and hung on to get the 10-point win behind 31 points from Naz Reid and 26 points from Anthony Edwards. The Timberwolves enhanced to 54-24 with the win, which has them in initially in the Western Conference standings.
Rui Hachimura led the Lakers with 30 points in the loss. Jaxson Hayes included 19 points and 10 rebounds off the bench, and Spencer Dinwiddie completed with 18 points. The Lakers was up to 45-34 after the loss. They now sit ninth in the Western Conference standings with simply 3 video games left in the routine season.
