The injury to Suns guard Eric Bledsoe turned out to be more severe than originally anticipated.
Bledsoe underwent surgery to repair a torn left meniscus and will miss the remainder of the 2015-16 season, the team announced on Tuesday per Marc J. Spears of Yahoo! Sports.
The Suns say guard Eric Bledsoe had surgery to repair a torn meniscus in his left knee today and will miss the rest of this season.
— Marc J. Spears (@SpearsNBAYahoo) December 29, 2015
The 26-year-old suffered the tear in the second quarter of Saturday’s 111-104 loss to the Philadelphia 76ers and was originally expected to be out until after the All-Star break. But the prognosis took a turn for the worse for Bledsoe, who has had a troublesome history of knee injuries, already missing 74 games and counting over his six NBA seasons.
Bledsoe looked poised to make his first NBA All-Star team this season too with 20.4 points per game, 4.0 rebounds per game, 6.1 assists per game, and 2.0 steals per game on 45.3 percent shooting from the field and 37.2 percent from distance.
The silver lining is that now the Suns can focus on the development of their young talent, particularly by giving heavy minutes to last June’s lottery pick 19-year-old Devin Booker in Bledsoe’s absence. With Brandon Knight now the sole playmaker, the team may finally get a coherent offensive identity as well, something they have lacked in recent years with their failed dual-point guard experiments.
But beyond that, there is no sugarcoating. Bledsoe is the team’s most irreplaceable player, an athletic two-way bulldog with a noticeably improving jumper, and this now looks like a lost season for the 12-21 Suns. They’ve looked like the NBA’s Bad News Bears recently, especially with the drama surrounding forward Markieff Morris and head coach Jeff Hornacek’s job security (or lack thereof). Perhaps Bledsoe’s diagnosis is the final straw that convinces the Suns to mail it in for the rest of the year and play for a lottery pick next summer.
