Raptors dealt huge blow with OG Anunoby injury

Nick Nurse informed reporters that the small forward will be out 'a while' with a hip injury, leaving the struggling Toronto Raptors with a big hole to fill in their rotation.

Video Transcript

AMIT MANN: Well it's going from bad to worse for the Toronto Raptors as Nick Nurse announced today that OG Anunoby will be missing some time with a hip pointer injury. Now I am no doctor but based off of a quick Yahoo! search, he will be out for around one to three weeks. The only way to fix it is simply rest, rest, rest, and stay in bed and hanging out. So OG is going to be watching a lot of Netflix, I think, over these next few weeks.

And if you are tracking at home, yeah, this is the second injury to happen during practice. First was Yuta Watanabe, who has still not played. And now OG Anunoby so I don't know what's going on there but not good. And if we're talking about how do you replace the production of OG Anunoby? Well, frankly you don't.

I mean, he was having a career year. He was off to a terrific start. You can really see that his work done during the off season was really shining through. And then defensively, he is one of your best team defenders and he is your most versatile defender. So there's going to be a big hole here. And the Raptors have to really think about how they're going to, kind of, mend this until he does return.

Probably one of the things that we're going to see is Khem Birch get inserted into the starting lineup. So now you got Scottie at the four, Pascal at the 3, and then he got Gary, and then Fred obviously rounding out the starting lineup. Or you know what? They could try and go small. So, maybe, it's Chris Boucher getting a look in there. And, maybe, it's Svia Mykhailiuk getting in there as well.

This is going to be probably pretty fluid because, like I said, there are no great solutions for this. But you're just trying to, kind of, keep the band-Aid on and make sure things don't go from bad to worse. I mean, right now they've lost five of their last six games. They're in the middle of this West Coast trip.

And frankly, if they don't keep their head above water over these next few weeks while OG is gone, things could go pretty bad. They could be well below 500 by the time he does return. So, not great news. That's the only way to look at this. Not great news.