Detroit Pistons forward Blake Griffin will meet with a specialist in Los Angeles this week and may consider season-ending surgery on his left knee, per Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports.
Griffin has been slowed all season and limited to 18 games because of the left knee issues. He had offseason surgery on the same knee in late April, which came after a 2018-19 campaign in which Griffin was the first Pistons player to post averages of 24-plus points, seven-plus rebounds and five-plus assists.
The Pistons are 13-24 after Sunday night’s road loss to the Los Angeles Lakers, a game that marked Griffin’s fourth straight absence. The Pistons were manhandled in the paint that game and saw the Lakers block 20 shots — one off the franchise record set in 1982.
At halftime of a Jan. 2 loss to the LA Clippers — Griffin’s former team — Pistons owner Tom Gores said the team had “a lot of work to do” to turn things around. Since those comments, Pistons center Andre Drummond has seen his name bandied about in trade talks that have linked him to the Atlanta Hawks.
Griffin is averaging 15.5 points, 4.7 rebounds and 3.3 assists per game this season and has two years and $76 million left on his deal. Gores indicated last week there’s no plan of how to move forward with Griffin for the rest of 2019-20.
“No, we’re not that far, and we’re just going to assess it in the next week or so,” Gores said last week. “He’s a trooper. If he could play, you know he’d be playing, so I think we just give him a few days of rest and see what happens.”
Detroit has yet to win more than two games in a row in 2019-20 and has lost 10 of its last 13 games. Already, the Pistons have had two separate losing streaks of five games and rank 21st in Defensive Rating, 26th in opponent points off turnovers and 24th in opponent points in the paint. Despite those struggles, the Pistons are 11th in the Eastern Conference and are just 3 1/2 games behind the Orlando Magic for the No. 8 seed.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
