A season of high hopes for the Indiana Pacers began with some bad news, as leading scorer Danny Granger was sidelined indefinitely just before the team's first game with a sore left knee. On Wednesday morning, the news went from bad to worse as the "indefinite" shelving was replaced by a more definitive timeline that could derail Indiana's hoped-for ascension to the No. 2 seed in a largely up-for-grabs Eastern Conference. In a press release , the Pacers announced that Granger had received an injection "to treat left patellar tendinosis" on Tuesday, and that team medical personnel estimates the forward's recovery time at about three months. NBA fans might be more familiar with the layman's term for patellar tendinosis, "jumper's knee," perhaps most famously suffered by then-Toronto Raptors star Vince Carter during the 2000-01 season ; he'd miss 66 games over the next three seasons. Three months puts Granger in line for a return in the beginning of February; if it's three months from Tuesday on the dot, he'd be looking at coming back for Indy's Feb. 6, 2013, road matchup with the Philadelphia 76ers. According to the Pacers' schedule , that comeback would follow 45 missed games, in addition to the four he's already missed. After tiptoeing through the tulips as one of the NBA's healthiest, injury-luckiest, most stable teams a season ago, the Pacers will play without their leading scorer — who, while not necessarily an iron man, has missed just seven games over the past two campaigns — for more than 60 percent of this year. Not quite what general manager Kevin Pritchard, head coach Frank Vogel or Pacers fans had in mind, to be sure, and a loss that will make Indiana's path from now through February significantly more difficult to navigate.
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