The Pistons will be without Reggie Jackson for a couple of months.
The Detroit Pistons enter this season with serious high-seed playoff ambitions. Things took a bad turn for the team this week however as rising point guard Reggie Jackson will miss 6-8 weeks due to injury.
“He’s going to be out for a while,” Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy said Wednesday. “We don’t know how long — and that’ll all be determined by what he chooses to do.
“He has not decided upon a treatment course yet; that decision should be in the next day or two. (Jackson) wanted to make sure they had a couple days to think about it after digesting what the doctors said.”
The 6-8 week timetable has been confirmed since that quote as Jackson has elected to go forward with a platelet-rich plasma injection.
Jackson had the treatment once before when he played in Oklahoma.
Van Gundy said surgery won’t be necessary and isn’t an option.
Jackson has been dealing with the knee tendonitis since early in his NBA career and it’s something he’ll likely have to deal with until he eventually retires.
“He’s been OK with (the decision),” Van Gundy said. “This is something that was talked about the week before camp. He didn’t want to go there at that point; he wanted to get into camp and see. He wasn’t getting better and hurting and struggling to get through stuff.”
With Jackson and his 18.8 points and 6.2 assists out of the lineup, the team will likely turn to Ish Smith, who they signed this past summer.
Ray McCallum Jr. and Lorenzo Brown are the other internal options. It doesn’t seem like the Pistons are looking to the free agent market, though.
“Right now, there’s not a lot out there on the market,” Van Gundy said. “There’s a few guys still out there, but I like what we’re seeing out of Ray and Lorenzo and we’ll stick with that.”
