Victor Oladipo’s situation calls back to Paul George’s from 2014 as the Indiana Pacers see their franchise player go down with a catastrophic injury again.
How? How did this happen to the Indiana Pacers twice in five years? How did the Indiana Pacers get cursed with another catastrophic injury? It was Paul George in 2014, but now in 2019, there’s an uncanny sense of déjà vu after Victor Oladipo left Wednesday’s game with a “severe” knee-injury.
Yes, yes, I know there’s supposed to be an MRI today that will tell us more about Oladipo’s injury, but with ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reporting that the Pacers fear it is a season-ending injury, that MRI feels like a formality at his point.
While the damage was slightly less apparent compared to the obviously broken leg of Paul George, the damage to Oladipo’s knee was bad enough for the towel over then leg treatment, signifying a certain level of visual gruesomeness.
Once a stretcher rolls onto the court, it’s hard to assume anything but a season-ending injury.
Déjà vu for the Indiana Pacers
The Pacers have been here before. The fans have been here before. The helpless feeling when the team’s best player is no longer that due to injury.
You worry about Oladipo’s health for him personally. The man is likely in a good deal of pain today. Even if this season wasn’t as good as his last, it was still near an All-Star level.
On the basketball side of things, you worry if he can ever play like he used to. Will his story be like Paul George, likely better than ever now? Or will it be like Danny Granger, who didn’t play anything like his old self after his series of injuries?
While Granger’s injury (or injuries) was less sudden and certainly less graphic, the fallout from it feels similar.
Granger, George, and now Oladipo all had slightly different paths to their careers — both before and after their injuries — but we don’t know which direction Oladipo’s will go. That’s what’s hard for him and the Pacers right now. The unknown.
Right now it feels more like George’s injury. Watching a player suddenly go down and knowing the season, and perhaps beyond, is altered. From the moment it happens, you know things changed.
With Granger, it was the slow decline, but there was hope, maybe naively, that he could be his old self at some point. It’s less obvious when it happens and rarely an exact point where the realization sets in.
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As Pacers fans, the feeling of uncertainty is unfortunately familiar. You start, mostly in jest, to wonder if the Pacers are cursed. How does the team’s best player for three generations now have a major injury?
We will learn more about Oladipo’s soon, but there’s a chance that Indiana’s franchise player has gone down with a seemingly random injury again if it’s more like George’s injury than Granger’s.
Until we hear more it’s pointless to speculate if it had something to do with his previous knee issues, but even if that’s the case it is a stretch to blame negligence or anything nefarious.
Life isn’t fair, neither is basketball
The whole situation, it’s just cruel.
It isn’t fair to Victor Oladipo, who went from a “bust” of sorts to an All-Star, to see the next chapter of his career likely be defined by rehab and questions of whether he can be the player he once was, even if it was only the second season of the new and improved Oladipo.
It isn’t fair to Thaddeus Young, Bojan Bogdanovic, or Myles Turner, the starters that earned the chance to run back last season’s team and see what they could do with another season of chemistry together. It isn’t fair to the new free agents that joined hoping to make a playoff run around the core.
It just isn’t fair that Pacers fans have been here before, either.