At no point during Thursday's 100-88 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder did Tony Parker resemble Tony Parker, the brilliant scorer and facilitator who has led the San Antonio Spurs to the top of the Western Conference and was being talked up as an MVP candidate just six weeks ago. He looked steps slow and ill at ease, lacking explosiveness and seeming unable to get to spots on the floor he typically reaches with no problem. Part of the credit there belongs to an OKC defense that boasts enough length, athleticism and discipline to pack the paint, clog driving lanes and recover to contest perimeter jumpers ... but that pretty clearly wasn't all that was going into Parker's 2-point, 1-for-6-shooting performance. Something else was up. And if I could see that, you know Spurs coach Gregg Popovich could, too. That's why he sat Parker for the final 7:08 of Thursday's game, and why he's more than a little worried about his 30-year-old triggerman, according to Jeff McDonald of the San Antonio Express-News : "I saw him come across half court actually limping at one time, so that's when we pulled him," Popovich said. "I said 'Tony, you’ve got to stop, so we can figure out what it is.' He just couldn't go." Heading into the game, Parker was dealing with a laundry list of bumps, including a bone bruise in his left ankle leftover from a sprain suffered March 1. Popovich doesn’t believe what plagued Parker in OKC was necessarily that, but a previously unreported injury to his shin. "My feeling is tendonitis, something in his shins or whatever, from the way it looked on the court, but I don’t know," said Popovich, who described himself [as] "very concerned" about his star guard's health. "We thought he had just kind of recovered from his ankle, so this was something new tonight with his leg," Popovich said. "I just don’t know what it is right now."
More...
More...