The Indiana Pacers are one of the teams headed to Orlando for the NBA’s bubble league to finish up the 2019-20 season. The team sat in fifth place in the Eastern Conference with a 39-26 record when the league’s COVID-19 hiatus began, and while you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks they will win the conference, a big boost would come if Victor Oladipo could return to his All-Star form.
Oladipo suffered a pretty serious quad injury during the 2018-19 campaign, and as a result, he’s only played in 13 games and hasn’t quite looked like himself as he’s worked off the rust. Still, at his best, Oladipo is one of the best shooting guards in the league.
The issue is that he is still coming off a serious injury, and when the bubble league tips off in late-July, he’ll have gone four and a half months between games. As such, Oladipo explained to Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN that he’s going to ramp his workouts up before making a final decision on whether or not he’ll take the floor at Disney.
“I feel a whole lot better,” Oladipo said. “I know there’s risk going into it with the unique situation that I’m in — being off so long and trying to ramp it up that fast. I’ve just got to be smart, that’s all.”
Oladipo apparently would like to play, but with how he’s coming off of a serious injury, it makes sense that the plan is to be cautious with the quad. As Wojnarowski noted, players have until Wednesday to inform their teams on whether or not they plan to go to Orlando, and rosters have to be submitted to the league by July 1.
