Shaedon Sharpe to Practice With Rip City Remix, Progressing Towards Return to Trail Blazers Lineup
Sharpe underwent core muscle surgery in early February and hopes to return to the lineup before the end of the season.
The Trail Blazers are assigning Shaedon Sharpe to their G League affiliate, the Rip City Remix, as he continues to ramp up towards a return from the core muscle surgery he underwent in early February.
This is a rehab assignment for Sharpe—he will stay in Portland for the week to practice with the Remix rather than accompanying the Blazers on the first part of their two-week, seven-game road trip that begins on Monday in Houston.
If this next stage of Sharpe’s ramp-up goes off without issue, it’s possible he could be active for the final stretch of the season, which includes home games in the second week of April against New Orleans, Golden State and Houston followed by the regular-season finale on April 14 in Sacramento.
It is unlikely that Sharpe will play in either of the Remix’s final two home games of the regular season, a back-to-back on Friday and Saturday against the Santa Cruz Warriors. This rehab assignment is similar to when the Blazers briefly assigned Scoot Henderson to the Remix in November to practice as he prepared to return from an early-season ankle injury.
Even though the Blazers are already mathematically eliminated from the playoffs with three weeks left to go in the regular season, the organization’s stance from the time Sharpe first had the surgery has been that if his rehab went according to plan and he was medically cleared to return before the end of the season, they wanted him to return for the final stretch of games.
The surgery Sharpe had is one the Blazers have become very familiar with over the past three years. It’s the same one Damian Lillard had in January of 2022, causing him to miss most of the 2021-22 season. While with the Blazers, Nassir Little also had that surgery twice in consecutive offseasons in 2022 and 2023, and Gary Payton II had it before the 2022-23 season.
The procedure typically comes with a six- to eight-week recovery timeline. In Lillard’s case, the decision was made mutually between him and the team for him to take the rest of that season off, both because that year’s Blazers team was well out of playoff contention by that point and to give Lillard his first extended physical and mental break since the summer of 2019.
Lillard had been dealing with the core muscle injury for several years before finally opting for surgery to address it after struggling during the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 and getting off to the worst start of his career in the 2021-22 season. Last season, in his final year with the Blazers, he had one of the best seasons of his career and made third team All-NBA, with this core issue finally behind him.
Sharpe is 11 years younger than Lillard was when he had the surgery, and hasn’t been playing on the injury for nearly as long. Blazers coach Chauncey Billups said in December that he thinks Sharpe got hurt during the Nov. 30 win in Cleveland. That game was Sharpe’s best game of the season—he finished with 29 points on 11-of-15 shooting, 10 rebounds, five assists and a steal.
After that, Sharpe was outstanding for the first two weeks of December before running out of gas. Through the first two months of the season, he logged at least 35 minutes 16 times, including 11 games playing at least 40 minutes. That type of usage for him was necessary as the Blazers navigated early-season backcourt injuries to Henderson, Anfernee Simons and Malcolm Brogdon, but it likely contributed to what was at first just a nagging groin injury eventually progressing to the point where Sharpe needed surgery.
The injury was first identified on the team’s injury report as “right adductor soreness” ahead of the Blazers’ Dec. 19 game against Phoenix. Sharpe started that game but only played eight minutes in the first half before exiting, and missed the next five games. He returned to the lineup on Jan. 1 and played in the first six games of the Blazers’ seven-game road trip, where he continued to struggle outside of a 21-point performance in Jan. 7’s overtime win in Brooklyn—another game where he played 40 minutes. He left the 62-point Jan. 11 blowout loss in Oklahoma City after playing just 21 minutes, and hasn’t played since.
Initially, the Blazers hoped that extended rest would be enough to make the injury go away, and on Jan. 16 they ruled Sharpe out for two weeks. Two weeks later, on Jan. 31, the team said he was “making good progress” in his recovery and would begin ramping up with light on-court activities. However, a week later, the team said he was experiencing “a worsening of his symptoms” during his ramp-up. He underwent the surgery on Feb. 9 in Philadelphia.
After Sharpe had the surgery, the Blazers said he would be re-evaluated in six weeks. Now, six weeks later, it appears everything is going as planned and Sharpe is on the verge of a return.
Much like the decision to shut Lillard down in 2022, the desire for Sharpe to return for the end of a lottery-bound season is mutual between player and organization.
Sharpe has continued to be around the team during his recovery and has consistently told people he wants to play again this year if he can. From the team’s end, they learned during their previous experiences with players recovering from this injury that no matter what, there will be some discomfort and rust in returning. If Sharpe is fully cleared to play, they’d rather he work through those initial physical and mental hurdles in the last week of this season so he can enter the offseason with this issue completely in the rear view.
As the season winds down, the Blazers have several of their main rotation players banged up, with Simons, Jerami Grant, Matisse Thybulle and Deandre Ayton all missing time in the past week. But according to people familiar with the team’s plans, they’re hoping most or all of them, as well as Brogdon, are able to return at some point before the season is over. The only player fully ruled out for the rest of the season is Robert Williams III, who underwent right knee surgery in November.
Portland currently has the fifth-worst record in the NBA at 19-52, separated by one-and-a-half games from Charlotte for fourth from the bottom. While the organization is undoubtedly paying attention to lottery odds at this point in the year, they haven’t had any trouble losing games this season with everyone in the lineup. They view their most important players getting extended time playing together as a higher priority than any attempt to game the lottery standings by shutting players down as they did at the ends of the last two seasons.
“I think we’ve got so much growth and development that needs to happen,” Billups said Friday. “Obviously, we’re not going to the playoffs. But these dudes need to get better, and they need to get to know each other while playing. The way you get better at basketball is playing basketball. I’m of the mindset that I always think you should be hooping. If they don’t play for some time, how are they getting better?”
At times in the early part of this season, Sharpe appeared poised to take the kind of leap into a franchise building block that the Blazers envisioned he’d be when they drafted him No. 7 overall in 2022. The core injury and subsequent surgery halted that progress. But in the final days of the franchise’s third straight trip to the lottery, they may be getting one of this rebuild’s most important young players back in the lineup before it’s over.
Yay!!!!!!