The Spurs medical staff has cleared rookie guard Dylan Harper to play in Game 1 of the first-round Western Conference playoff series with Portland.<\/p>\n
Harper is nursing an injured left thumb on his shooting hand that forced him to leave Sunday’s 128-118 loss to Denver in the regular season finale in the third quarter, but\u00a0he fully participated in practices Tuesday and Wednesday, which largely consisted of Xs-and-Os work rather than intense scrimmaging.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe expect him to play Sunday,” Johnson said after Wednesday’s workout at the Victory Capital Performance Center.<\/p>\n
“He just got it hit and there’s going to be some pain there \u2026 He’s got to work his way through that, but we expect him to play.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harper averaged 11.8 points,\u00a03.9 assists, 3.4 rebounds and shot 34.3% from 3-point range in 22.6 minutes over 69 games after the Spurs selected him second overall last\u00a0June in the 2025 NBA Draft.<\/p>\n
League MVP candidate Victor\u00a0Wembanyama also completed his second practice of the week Wednesday after a left rib injury led the Spurs to hold him out of two of the last four games, including the Denver game. In the second-to-the-last game, he had 40 points, 13 rebounds, five assists and two blocks in just 26 minutes in a 139-120 victory over Dallas after entering the game needing at least 20 minutes in one of the final two outings to satisfy the NBA’s 65-game rule to qualify for awards.<\/p>\n
Wemby was asked how close he is to being back to 100% after the rib injury:<\/p>\n
“I’m very close, but we never really go back to 100%, except before your season (in) the off-season. … There’s always something going on. In terms of regular season shape, I’m very close,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Spurs medical staff has cleared rookie guard Dylan Harper to play in Game 1 of the first-round…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":609443,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,85],"class_list":["post-609442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=609442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/609443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=609442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=609442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=609442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}