Devin Booker of the Phoenix Suns, who put up historically good numbers for a 21-year-old, will likely miss the start of the 2018-19 season.
Booker recently underwent surgery to repair a joint in his right hand (his shooting hand) per The Athletic’s Shams Charania.
Suns guard Devin Booker underwent surgery to repair an injury to the fifth metacarpophalangeal joint in his right hand and will miss approximately six weeks.
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) September 10, 2018
After earning First Team All-Rookie honors in his first year in the league, Booker went on to have an astonishing 70-point game against the Boston Celtics in his sophomore campaign. Though his team lost, Booker covered himself in glory with an amazing display of shot creation, jump-shooting and difficult shot-making. That 70-point outburst made Booker the youngest player in NBA history (20 years old) to score 70 points in a game (David Thompson notched 73 for the Denver Nuggets at the ripe old age of 23).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy9xl-GXfkI
In his third season in the league, Booker continued that upward trajectory and finished with stellar per-game numbers of 24.9 points, 4.7 assists, 4.5 rebounds and 38% shooting from deep. Booker also continued to expand his playmaking responsibilities and ballhandling duties — so much so that it seemed likely that Booker would have started the 2018-19 season as the Phoenix Suns de facto starting point guard after the recent Ryan Anderson trade shipped off the team’s only other major option at the one in Brandon Knight.
However, those plans must now be put on the shelf, as the news came down that Booker would miss 6 weeks after having surgery on his shooting hand.
Let’s hope that the surgery doesn’t affect Booker’s shooting going forward, as he has one of the sweetest strokes in the entire league, and he has already torched multiple teams in his young career. As the only player to drop 70+ on a team since his idol Kobe Bryant scored 81 against the Raptors, Booker has one of the highest ceilings of any player in the league, and he has already proven that he can produce at the highest level, as this recent Team USA workout indicates:
https://twitter.com/Aholmes20/status/1024260289565532160
Phoenix Suns fans (and NBA fans in general) can only hope for a speedy recovery for the talented twentysomething.
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