Kemba Walker avoided serious injury after a scary collision with Semi Ojeleye occurred in the second quarter of Friday’s loss to the Denver Nuggets.
The Boston Celtics guard went head-first into his teammate before falling to the ground, where he remained motionless for several minutes. Walker was stabilized and stretchered off the court and taken to a local area hospital for further evaluation. Thankfully, he was diagnosed with a neck sprain, which probably was best-case scenario considering how ugly it looked.
Walker originally was listed as doubtful ahead of Monday’s game against the Sacramento Kings, but was deemed out just ahead of tip-off. Before the game, though, Celtics team doctor Tony Schena went into detail regarding the injury to Walker and the extent of what he was feeling when he collided with Ojeleye.
“When he landed, he had numbness and tingling in his hands … he never lost consciousness and he stayed on the floor mostly as a medical precaution,” he said, per The Athletic’s Jared Weiss. “Because he had numbness and tingling in his hands, they took full spine precaution … he was then brought to a level 1 trauma center and was given a full neurological evaluation … he had no significant damage to the bone architecture around his neck or the tissue around his neck.”
Weiss also noted Walker was “placed in a soft collar” for his flight back to Boston from Denver and underwent “more imaging and neurological testing at Auerbach Center.”
There’s no exact timetable for Walker’s return to the court, but it’s certainly refreshing to see him in such good spirits and expressing a desire to play Monday, considering how bad the injury could have been.
