A doctor explains NBA star Kevin Durant’s knee injury

Kevin Durant’s MVP series hit an obstacle Saturday night during the Brooklyn Nets’ game against the New Orleans Pelicans. With just five minutes left in the first half, Pelican Bruce Brown fell against Durant’s left leg, causing the small forward to be removed from the track with a knee injury yet to be confirmed.

In a new video on his YouTube channel, sports medicine expert Dr. Brian Sutterer game footage of the incident in an attempt to determine the severity of the injury, giving his professional opinion on what it could mean for the rest of Durant’s season. the Nets. Replay reveals that when Brown collided with Durant, it placed a valgus charge on his medial collateral ligament (MCL), which is on the inside of the knee.

“If you bend the knee inward, you are going to put tension on this inner part of the knee and possibly sprain the MCL,” Sutterer says. “If enough strain enters the knee from the side, you can always be at risk of an ACL tear, so it’s always part of the evaluation with the physical examination. Your thigh muscle tendons on the inside of the knee actually “comes down to also insert on what we call the posteromedial angle, and so there is potential for injury to those structures. But I will put an MCL sprain at the top of the list based on the mechanism.”

Sutterer goes on to explain that if Durant has Having contracted an MCL sprain, there is good news: this type of injury rarely requires surgical intervention to treat. “Usually, when the MCL is torn, there is more rupture at the higher proximal point closer to the femur, if the rupture occurs lower at its insertion on the tibia, there is less blood supply, and so those have poor healing prognosis … but the majority of MCL sprains for which you do not need surgery, “he says. “For a grade 1 tear where there is only a slight sprain and stretch, you usually talk in the order of weeks … Hopefully he avoided something big here.”