SPURS LOSE PARKER FOR SIX WEEKS DUE TO HAND INJURY

The San Antonio Spurs received some good news and some bad news about the hand injury suffered by All Star guard Tony Parker.  The good news?  Parker’s hand won’t require surgery.  The bad news?  He’ll miss  six weeks of action, effectively wiping out the rest of the regular season.  Assuming no further complications, the team is hopeful that he’ll be back in time for the playoffs although with the Spurs currently in 7th place in the toughly competitive Western Conference a postseason berth is by no means guaranteed.

Parker injured his shooting hand during last Saturday night’s victory at Memphis.  X-rays revealed that he’d fractured the fourth metacarpal, to date the most severe of the many injuries that he’s dealt with this season.  Despite playing much of the time at less than 100% Parker had been averaging 16.5 PPG and was the Spurs’ second leading scorer.  
San Antonio head coach Greg Popovich tried to take a ‘glass half full’ approach with his comments:

"Everything is by degrees. That would be worse if he needed surgery, so I guess it makes me feel better. They told us they thought it'd be six weeks before he could do anything, so it's probably four to eight weeks."

Teammate Manu Ginobili added a similar note:

"We haven't had a great season so far, but we're hoping we can turn it around. Then seeing Tony go down, it hurts. But who cares, right? The rest of the teams aren't going to give us wins just because he's hurt. We have to go there and compete and try to win anyway."

Parker’s injury compounds Popovich’s personnel management issues.  He’d been trying to limit the playing time of Ginobili and Tim Duncan in hopes they’d be ‘fresh’ for a playoff run.  Now, they’ll need Ginobili to pick up minutes at pointguard and will need Duncan to carry more of the scoring load.  Popovich concluded that Parker’s health was most important and that it was crucial to have all three of his best players healthy for the postseason:

"No matter where we are at the end of the season, he and Timmy's health are really important to us, as we've seen in the past. If one of those guys, including Tony, isn't there, we're not going anywhere. We have to have all three of them because that's how our team is built. We have role players around those three."

 San Antonio hasn’t gotten off to a good start in Parker’s absence.  They faced the Cleveland Cavaliers on Monday night and even without LeBron James in the lineup came out on the wrong end of a 97-95 final score.  NBA betting enthusiasts who backed San Antonio as -2 point road favorites took the loss as well, with the 192 combined points managing to exceed the posted total of 188.