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Five days later, the Lakers are taking on the Western Conference-leading Thunder again, and this time they won\u2019t even have LeBron James in the lineup.<\/p>\n
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James, who is managing a left foot injury, will miss Tuesday night\u2019s showdown in L.A., the Lakers announced hours before tip-off.<\/a><\/p>\n ESPN\u2019s Dave McMenamin reported<\/a> that, more specifically, James is dealing with left foot soreness. L.A. has already clinched the Pacific Division title and a spot in the playoffs. At 50-28, the Lakers are currently fourth in the West. They\u2019re only a half-game back of the Denver Nuggets, whom they hold a tiebreaker over.<\/p>\n L.A. has four regular-season games remaining. That includes Tuesday\u2019s game versus the Thunder, which marks the first of three games in four nights for JJ Redick\u2019s injury-riddled squad.<\/p>\n Don\u010di\u0107 is nursing a left hamstring strain<\/a>, and the Slovenian superstar is reportedly in Europe seeking specialized medical treatment<\/a> to speed up his recovery from a setback that interrupted an MVP-caliber campaign. In his first full season with the Lakers, Don\u010di\u0107 has posted a league-leading 33.5 points per game. He went off in March, averaging 37.5 across the month, but now he has to wait and see if he\u2019ll even be eligible for the NBA\u2019s end-of-season awards.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n Since he finished one game shy of the league\u2019s 65-game minimum for those honors, Don\u010di\u0107\u2019s camp applied for an \u201cExtraordinary Circumstances Challenge,\u201d citing the two games he missed for the birth of his second child<\/a>.<\/p>\n Don\u010di\u0107\u2019s injury diagnosis is a Grade 2 hamstring strain, and he\u2019s out indefinitely at the moment. Reaves, meanwhile, is working his way back from a Grade 2 oblique strain and is reportedly expected to miss four-to-six weeks. Like Don\u010di\u0107, Reaves has enjoyed a career year in 2025-26. He\u2019s averaging 23.3 points, 5.5 assists and 4.7 rebounds per contest.<\/p>\nDon\u010di\u0107 and Reaves are the Lakers\u2019 top scorers this season. James is third on that leaderboard. After a 134-128 defeat to the Dallas Mavericks<\/a> on Sunday, the 41-year-old described the gut check he experienced when learning his teammates\u2019 injury news.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a shot to the heart obviously and to the chest and to the mainframe with Luka,\u201d James said, via McMenamin. \u201cWe got that news kind of quick. \u2026 AR was kind of dealing with the [oblique] pain. \u2026 We knew he was going to get an MRI, but, yeah, I woke up from my nap yesterday and then saw that news, and I was like, \u2018S***.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Now James, too, will be out of the Lakers\u2019 lineup for their latest bout with the Thunder.<\/p>\n James, a 22-time All-Star in his NBA-record 23rd season, has appeared in 57 games this season. He missed the first 14 with sciatica<\/a>, a pain that travels along the sciatic nerve, which runs from the lower back, through the glute and down the leg.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Last week, when the Los Angeles Lakers lost to the defending NBA champion Oklahoma City Thunder by 43 points, Luka Don\u010di\u0107 and Austin Reaves suffered injuries that will keep them out at least through the remainder of the regular season. Five days later, the Lakers are taking on the Western Conference-leading Thunder again, and this … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26594,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Lakers-LeBron-James-out-for-Tuesdays-game-vs-Thunder-with.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26593"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26595,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26593\/revisions\/26595"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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