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Well this is going to come as a shock, but—get this—turns out that a Portland Trail Blazers’ center has injured his knee. Crazy, right? I’ll give you a moment to clean up the coffee you just spit out everywhere.

From the O‘s Jason Quick.

Center Marcus Camby has a partial tear of his meniscus in left knee. Surgery slated for later this week.

Camby landed awkwardly on his left knee around the seven minute mark of last night’s victory of Minnesota. An early morning MRI seemed to put him in the clear, but a later examination revealed the tear. I’m no Dr. Kneeologist—although covering the Blazers makes me the equivalent of a nurse practitioner Kneeologist—but this shouldn’t be a season ending injury for Camby, although he’ll certainly be sidelined for awhile. He’ll be the fifth (!) Blazers player this season to go under the knife for knee surgery, joining Roy, Elliot Williams, Jeff Pendergraph, and of course, the man who gets a repeat customer discount, Greg Oden.

On April 11th 2010, Roy slightly tore his meniscus in a game against the Lakers, had surgery four days later, and returned to action within the week. Although that was an extreme case, and Roy’s knee-health hasn’t actually been the same since. Um, never mind. Forget I brought that up.

We’ll post an update when a timetable for Camby becomes available and the team makes a formal announcement.

Update 9:08 pm:
And here’s that announcement:

PORTLAND — Portland Trail Blazers center Marcus Camby will undergo arthroscopic surgery later this week to repair a partial medial meniscus tear in his left knee, it was announced today by General Manager Rich Cho.

“The MRI taken earlier today did not show anything significant,” said Cho. “However, a more thorough review tonight from our team physician did reveal a partial tear.”

The exact date for Camby’s arthroscopy has yet to be determined. A timeline for his return will be set following surgery.

Ezra Ace Caraeff is the former Music Editor for the Mercury, and spent nearly a third of his life working at the paper. More importantly, he is the owner of Olive, the Mercury’s unofficial office dog....

20 replies on “Marcus Camby Partially Tears Meniscus”

  1. This is now getting officially ridiculous. Does the NBA keep stats for team injuries? We should be the proud owners of a leading stat for this shit by now.

  3. I don’t really follow basketball all that closely, but is it normal for everybody on a given team to be made out of glass? My point of reference is hockey, and it just doesn’t seem like you see this sort of thing all that much in hockey…

  9. Ezra this knee curse narrative is becoming lazy reporting. These athletes have a highly regimented life, someone is in charge of their training and stretching. Who? What is their background? Were there many knee injuries at their previous jobs?

    Other lines of inquiry include talking to ex-Blazers about the Memorial Coliseum court vs. others; seeing what kind of shoes these knee-injured Blazers were wearing; and looking at other knee-injury plagued teams and seeing if you can identify common themes.

    Things happen for reasons! Don’t you want to be the hero who solves the mystery of God’s Curse?

  10. There are only so many Blazer players to get hurt. At some point the curse will have to filter down to the rest of the Blazer family. Will Blaze just spontaneously combust? Will the dance team get Crohn’s disease? Will Ezra get leaky nipples?

  14. @sexmachinealpha Lazy reporting is what I do best.

    Honestly, I am not of the opinion that this is the fault of the training staff. For a large portion of his career, Camby was considered damaged goods, a player who gets injured and injured often. Previous to the 2006-07 season, Camby’s legacy was that of an injury-prone center who was only healthy for 35% of the games between 2001-2003. All the stretching in the world wasn’t going to help what happened to him on Monday night.

    As for the court, of ALL the Blazers’ knee injuries, only two have actually occurred on the Rose Garden hardwood. Camby’s slight tear from Monday, and the second Oden disaster (12/05/09). All the other injuries have occurred elsewhere. Joel Przybilla hurt his knee on the floor in Dallas, and then again in the shower. These are random acts, not something you can attribute to the floor at the Rose Garden.

    Then again, maybe the team should deflate that jumpy castle they have outside the locker room. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot of fun, but that thing is dangerous.

  16. I noticed that during the pre-game warm-ups on Tuesday, the Timberwolves were doing all kinds of fancy spinning dunks, while on the other side of the court three Blazers were sprawled out on the court with dudes stretching their legs/knees. 🙁

  17. @ROM That’s natural. Most teams have trainers doing on-court stretches with players during the layup (or “spinning dunk”) lines. The Blazers don’t have a lot of flair dunking players, so their warm-ups are pretty subdued.

    But back when Josh McRoberts was here, dude was a superstar of the pre-game. Then he’d sit on the bench for all 48 minutes of the game.

  18. “Most teams have trainers doing on-court stretches with players during the layup (or “spinning dunk”) lines. The Blazers don’t have a lot of flair dunking players, so their warm-ups are pretty subdued. “

    link starting to develop. Go with this.

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