(670 The Score) Injury-plagued Bulls point guard Lonzo Ball continues to play five-on-five basketball while eyeing a return to game action, but uncertainty still persists with the start of training camp looming next week.
“He’s excited about training camp, but again, during training camp, we’re going to try to find out the loads that he’s going to have to take in training camp, and the grind on a daily basis will (determine) his rotational minutes, his role and how much he’s going to play,” Bulls executive vice president of basketball operations Arturas Karnisovas said on the Mully & Haugh Show on Wednesday morning.
Ball hasn’t played in an NBA game since January 2022 due to a series of debilitating left knee injuries, which necessitated three surgeries in a 15-month stretch at one point. He has missed the entirety of the past two seasons.
Ball has been “doing more” lately, Karnisovas added, though a sickness recently slowed him down for a week. As for Ball’s potential role with the Bulls, that remains uncertain as he tries to make a historic return after a cartilage and meniscus transplant in his left knee.
Ball is entering the final season of his four-year contract with the Bulls.
“The thing that Arturas mentioned, which is critical, is we don’t know how he’s going to respond after games, after practices,” head coach Billy Donovan said Wednesday. “Because we haven’t seen it. That’s where we first got to start off with. Is it something where he plays 15 to 20 minutes and now he’s got to take the next day off? Can he play 25 to 30 minutes? How does he respond? The back-to-backs, we don’t know any of those things. So we’re going to wait to find out. I do think the one thing I look at it from this lens is Lonzo loves to play. He loves to play. And at his age, as much as he loves to play, he wants to play beyond this year. So we also have a responsibility to make sure that he’s in a position where he can play after this season, where it’s not one of these things where it’s not managed correctly or we’re not putting him in a situation to be effective. Could that be 15 to 18 minutes a game? Maybe. Could it be 20 to 25? Maybe. There’s just a lot of things. If you look at him as a basketball player, he’s an elite point guard that certainly warrants being out on the court a lot. But is he capable of doing that physically? And those things we just don’t know right now. And until we get to training camp and he’s out there, we’ll have a better feel of how we can maybe manage him and allow him to be a productive player.”