Trae Young’s recovery from his right ankle sprain was so fast, Chelsea Lane thought it was like something out of a comic book.
“If you ask her, she thinks I have, like, Wolverine blood… she doesn’t understand how I healed up so fast,” Young said of the Hawks’ VP of Athletic Performance and Sports Medicine. “The way it looked, when it first happened to now, it’s kind of crazy. But I was giving her props, too, because she deserves it all.”
When Young was helped off the court Oct. 29 in Miami after coming down awkwardly on his right ankle , it certainly didn't look like he'd be back on the court less than a week later.
Still no word on if Young is secretly part of the X-Men, but he did in fact practice from start to finish Monday. Coach Lloyd Pierce wouldn’t fully give the green light on Young playing when the Hawks host the Spurs Tuesday at State Farm Arena, but said he will be evaluated coming off Monday’s practice to determine if he'll play.
For now, Young is listed as “questionable” on the Hawks’ injury report.
"We always wait to see how to see how it responds... we work, and we see how it responds, and if everything goes well, then we assume he's ready to go tomorrow,” Pierce said.
Even though Young has made a remarkable recovery in a short amount of time, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t in a lot of pain last week. After Young made his way to the locker room in Miami and got his ankle wrapped, he tried to stand up and do a calf raise on his right leg.
“I almost fell over,” Young said. “I couldn’t move. There was no way I could’ve returned.”
Young missed the second half of that game and the Hawks’ next game against the Heat Thursday. Since getting injured, he stayed off his ankle as much as he could, did different movements to keep it strong and spent a lot of time with his ankle in an ice bucket.
Young said Lane is the secret to bouncing back from injury so quickly — avoiding missing any more games was motivation to follow his training regimen diligently.
“It feels great,” Young said. “This is probably the hardest I’ve worked as far as a small time period, and needing to listen, to do everything I could to be able to get back. If anybody knows me, (they know) I hate missing games. I hate not being able to play. So I was trying to do everything I could to be able to get back.”
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