James Harden will be out indefinitely after suffering a setback Monday in his recovery from his right hamstring strain. And in a major blow to the Nets, now they can’t guarantee the 31-year-old will even be ready before the playoffs.
“James, he’ll be back when he’s back. That may not be until the playoffs. It may be sooner. I don’t know,” Nets coach Steve Nash said before Tuesday’s game at New Orleans. “We have no control over that other than working as hard as we can to support him and getting back to full health to play again. We’re prepared for whenever that may be.”
Harden, who rarely misses time, missed his seventh straight game with the hamstring strain Tuesday against the Pelicans. It’s the first time he has missed seven straight games since the 2017-18 season — and that number is about to rise dramatically.
Harden’s rehab went sideways during a workout on Monday. Imaging on his right hamstring revealed a setback, and now his timeline for a return to action is up in the air.
“He just felt it. He didn’t fall or stumble or anything out of the ordinary. He just felt something maybe in the ballpark of a strain,” Nash said. “So, just a setback and then the scan revealed that he suffer a setback. So not much more to it other than just disappointment and that we have to rebuild and get him going again.”
Harden was in the midst of an MVP-caliber campaign, averaging 25.4 points, 11 assists and 8.7 rebounds.
But his season has been disrupted by injuries. The hamstring issue first surfaced on March 31, when he felt soreness during a win over the Rockets, his former team.
Harden sat out the next two games as the Nets said imaging had turned up clean and that he did not have a Grade 1 strain. But when Harden returned, for the Nets’ April 5 victory over the rival Knicks, he lasted just four minutes.
Nash subsequently said that another batch of scans showed a Grade 1 strain, and Harden began a rehab program. He had been inching toward a return to the court before suffering the latest bad news.
“Really, I knew. I was at the workout but we didn’t know until you have the scan. So I just found that news as well,” Nash said. “Yeah, back to square one. We’ll rehabilitate him and get him back whenever we can, and who knows when that will be.
“And we’ll support James and we’ll support our performance team in getting him back in his best condition as possible. And hopefully that comes sooner than later, but there’s no guarantee. We just keep chipping away, we keep moving forward and we hope for a speedy recovery.”
The Nets have pinned their hopes largely on Harden.
Before pulling off the four-team mega-trade for him in mid-January, the Nets were just 7-6, fourth in the Eastern Conference and with the 11th-best record in the NBA. Since Harden’s debut, however, the Nets were 27-7 when he played.
The Nets went into Tuesday 25-8 when at least two of their Big 3 (Harden. Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving) played. Durant is currently out with a left thigh contusion, so the Nets are going to be in survival mode until they can regain some semblance of health, and figure out how to take something from these games with a shorthanded roster.
“The No. 1 priority in some respects has to be survival. We have to not overburden the rest of the roster,” Nash said. “Everyone’s going to have more responsibility than they did in the past, and sometimes that can be too much exposure, physically, when you haven’t been used to that. … So we’ve got to be careful, but at the same time, we don’t have a lot of options. So how do we navigate that?
“It’s going to be very tricky. And then just still staying positive and demanding that we are a competitive group and stay connected and together and play for one another and have that fighting spirit and keep moving this thing along and see what we can build out of this adversity. See if we can build some resolve or some connectivity, whatever it may be. It’ll serve us down the road.”
But they have no idea how far down that road they will be before Harden rejoins them.
