The Portland Trail Blazers had an excellent win over the Mavericks last night, unfortunately this was marred by an injury to key forward Zach Collins. How serious is this injury and who is likely to fill the gap at power forward?
The Portland Trail Blazers look like they will be without power forward Zach Collins for an extended period of time after he dislocated his shoulder last night. In serious pain when he went off, Collins could miss anywhere from three to eight weeks with this injury. There are a number of options for this team to replace Collins. An MRI tonight will help determine the extent of the damage and then the team can focus on solutions to replacing him in the starting line-up.
Portland F Zach Collins will get an MRI on his dislocated left shoulder Monday, league source tells ESPN. He was hurt in victory over Dallas tonight.
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) October 28, 2019
The first item of business should be to move Rodney Hood to the four, and bring Kent Bazemore into the starting lineup. Hood played plenty of minutes at the four last year and can matchup well against quicker forwards. Though this lineup wont be as strong defensively, they wont lack anything on offense.
Rebounding may be a problem with this five though, so Hassan Whiteside will likely see an uptick of minutes until Collins returns. Mario Hezonja and Anthony Tolliver will play the back up four minutes between them. Though Skal Labissiere played a lot of power forward last year he is being used as a center only this season.
Hezonja could be the guy to benefit most from Collins absence. He has shown some of the shine that saw him drafted in the lottery all those years ago. He has the size and skill to play the four in a lot of situations and has been shooting the ball well too.
Though this is a blow for the Blazers, they have the squad depth to cover this injury. Depending on the severity of the injury they could use their fifteenth roster spot to bring someone else in. It’s too early to sign players to ten day contracts though so they will have to be sure whoever they bring in is someone they want on the roster for the rest of the year.
It’s not likely that they sign a new player to cover Collins as they have the depth internally to cover the games he will miss. This is disappointing for Collins himself as it looked like he was breaking out this year. But he will come back after a few months and be ready for another playoff run.
This Blazers team has dealt with adversity before with injuries to Jusuf Nurkic and the like. This is no different to that situation. How the other players step-up will partly decide how well this team does while Collins is out.