Nets Brook Lopez Has Successful Surgery And Bone Graft Procedure

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Stop me if you heard this before Brooklyn Nets fans —- Brook Lopez had successful surgery and the Nets have officially ruled him out for the remainder of the season.

The Nets All-Star center, who was averaging a career-high 20.7 points per game, had surgery Saturday on his broken right foot at Duke Medical Center in North Carolina. He broke the same foot for the second time on Dec. 20.

Besides repairing the fractured fifth metatarsal, surgeons also repositioned another bone in his foot which is known as a first metatarsal osteotomy.

Nets medical director Dr. Riley Williams III said in a statement that part of the procedure “lessens the stress on the fractured bone, and decreases the likelihood of re-injury in the future.”

This was the same career-saving procedure that was done to help Zydrunas Ilgauskas back in 2001 after he repeatedly broke the same foot over and over between 1998-2001. This osteotomy procedure allowed him to play an additional 10 seasons and only miss a total of 88 games in that span after only playing 29 games total in the previous three seasons.

The same surgical procedure was also performed on Houston center Yao Ming but it was unsuccessful for him and the chronic foot problems forced him to retire prematurely.

Nets general manager Billy King was very contrite when answering questions on Lopez.
“He had surgery. It was successful. And then he’ll recover and be back playing. We can sit here and say, ‘last-ditch effort’ or whatever, he had surgery. They said it’s gonna be a successful recovery, so I mean, we can’t sit here today on Jan. 4 and say what’s gonna happen when he starts playing again. We can’t speculate on that, and I’m not gonna do that.”

Let’s all hope that Lopez can duplicate the Ilgauskas results and come back to play another 10 years in Brooklyn.

Get well soon big man and fingers crossed.

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