Isaiah Hartenstein Out Tonight for Cleveland Rematch Game

-Staff Reports-

I hate to hear this. Isaiah will be out of action for awhile with a calf strain. You never know how quickly some guys bounce back from soft tissue injuries.

Let’s keep this in mind for the Thunder tonight…since Isaiah came back from his broken hand injury—the Thunder are a league best 22-2 with him playing and Chet Holmgren still nursing his most recent fracture.

22-2.

Think about that. And within that span of games Jaylin Williams, the Thunder’s third center was not available for quite a few games with his own injury issues.

But tonight JWill along with JDubb will have to play most of the critical center minutes against a very big Cleveland Cavalier lineup.

And here’s the thing about Cleveland, they’re not only big, but like the Thunder, they enjoy playing at a fast pace. The 48 Minutes of Hell thing didn’t really play into the game last week in Cleveland. It was a scoring fest, not a defensive grind type of game.

So… I would think the Thunder with a smaller lineup are going to attempt to speed up this game as much as possible given one might think rebounding will be an issue tonight for the Thunder.

This intrigues me. Can Coach Mark with no real center tonight…turn this game into a high octance turnover fest with the Thunder scoring 24-26 points off of live turnovers and scoring quickly off of transition threes?

Maybe the big rookie kid Jones can step up and play some high quality minutes or possibly Dieng could up his physicality a couple of notches.

But beyond tonight…I hope this calf strain isn’t a factor for the Thunder’s season. Jamal Murray’s injury issues have been calf strain related for over a year now.. The other night in Dallas was purely an outlier game for Jamal this season. Not a turnaround game, but an outlier of sorts.

Isaiah, get well, buddy. I want to see you guys challenge that Chicago Bulls’ 70 game barrier. Otherwise, the Western Conference regular season is pretty much not all that interesting this season.



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