Hmm, same as Giannis' injury?
MILWAUKEE — Until 3:40 remaining in the third quarter of Tuesday’s game against the Boston Celtics, things were going well for the Milwaukee Bucks. In the middle of a four-game losing streak, the Bucks were up 15 points on the NBA’s only 60-win team.
Then disaster struck.
Without making contact with another player, Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo crumpled to the floor and immediately grabbed the lower half of his left leg.
After sitting for a short period with teammates and a trainer surrounding him, Antetokounmpo put weight on the leg and then put an arm around the shoulders of teammates Brook Lopez and Thanasis Antetokounmpo. Eventually, Antetokounmpo walked back to the Bucks’ locker room under his own power.
The Bucks announced Tuesday night that Antetokounmpo strained his left soleus, which is a muscle in the calf. But Antetokounmpo managed to avoid damage to his left Achilles tendon — a best-case outcome — and his return will be based on treatment and how the strained calf’s rehab response, league sources told The Athletic’s Shams Charania on Wednesday morning.
The soleus is one of two muscles that make up the calf, so teams will often refer to soleus strains as the more general calf strain, but there are instances where teams have specified that a player suffered from a soleus strain. One of those instances occurred last season with Lillard, while he was a member of the Portland Trail Blazers.
“That s— hurt,” Lillard said in response to a question from The Athletic about how it felt when had the same injury in the first month of the 2022-23 season. “It hurt. … When I did it, usually I’m able to walk things off. I feel like I have a high pain tolerance and when I did it, I started to walk, it wasn’t just that it was that painful, it was that the muscle just can’t handle it.
https://theathletic.com/5404588/2024/04/10/giannis-leg-injury-calf-achilles/