Victor Oladipo injury update: Heat veteran out for season after hurting knee vs. Bucks

The Miami Heat cruised to a 121-99 Game 3 win against the Milwaukee Bucks to take a 2-1 series lead Saturday night, but it wasn’t without a scary injury in the fourth quarter of the game. Heat guard Victor Oladipo slipped in the closing minutes of the game and immediately began grabbing at his left knee. A stretcher was brought in, but Oladipo waved it off and was instead taken back to the locker room with his arms around the shoulders of his teammates.

On Sunday, however, the Heat announced that Oladipo suffered a torn patellar tendon in his left knee and will miss the remainder of the season.

The injury occurred when Oladipo drove to the basket with just under four minutes remaining in the game. As he went up to elevate for a potential layup, his planting leg slipped from under him and caused him to crumble to the ground. Almost immediately, Oladipo began grabbing at his left knee, and when teammate Caleb Martin came to check to see if he was okay, Oladipo just shook his head no.

Here’s how the injury happened:

“Once the stretcher was out there, he was like, ‘I’m not getting on that thing,'” Spoelstra said after the game on Saturday night. “So, we’ll just have to see. I feel like throwing up right now, but I don’t know what the prognosis is. I’m going to stay positive and we’ll just see what happens after we scan him tomorrow.”

The body language from the Heat players suggested that the injury was serious, and given that Oladipo has struggled to stay healthy due to various injuries you could tell that his teammates felt for him in that moment. 

“It hurts to see somebody that you care about go through something like that,” Duncan Robinson said of Oladipo’s injury. “Obviously, we don’t know what it is at this point, but we’re all hoping for the best.”

Oladipo missed all but eight games last season due to a quad tear, and missed the first 25 games of this season with a knee injury. Though he struggled with injuries, he had shown flashes of his former self several times this season. In Game 2 of this series he totaled 15 points on 6 of 13 from the field, to go along with five rebounds. In Saturday night’s game he had a very efficient eight points, two rebounds and two steals in 19 minutes of action.