The Warriors will be without one of their veteran leaders for the foreseeable future.
Chris Paul will undergo surgery next week after suffering a left hand fracture in Golden State's 113-109 win over the Detroit Pistons on Friday and could miss significant time.
How much time, exactly? While the specific nature of Paul's injury is not known at this time, Stanford Medicine's Dr. Amy Ladd, MD, provided possible insight on Paul's fracture in an interview with NBC Sports Bay Area on Saturday.
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"Based on the image and the video that I've seen, he's holding his palm, which suggests that he has -- well, we know that he has a fracture of some sort -- and where he's holding it, it looks like it might be a metacarpal [bone]," Ladd explained. "So that's down at the base of the hand."
Paul's injury occurred with 6:08 remaining in the third quarter when the 38-year-old chased down an offensive rebound and appeared to get his hand caught on the jersey of Pistons guard Jaden Ivey.
Paul then walked off the court and straight to the Warriors' locker room, where it became clear he had sustained a serious injury. Per Ladd, recovery from metacarpal surgery with a pin or plate and screws in place is pretty routine.
Golden State Warriors
"If he immediately knew something was wrong then there might be a deformity associated with it, but that's not always bad because there's some fractures that are pretty straightforward that you can fix, and 'fix' to us means you can put a pin in it or a screw across it or a plate and screws," Ladd explained.
And because Paul injured his non-shooting left hand, he could return to play sooner than had the injury occurred to his dominant hand.
"But if it's pretty straightforward and it's rendered stable by the internal splint, sometimes the screw or the rod or the pin itself makes the bone stronger," Ladd shared. "Only if you need to remove it is there a risk of significant re-injury or refracture. If the surgery of the pin, screw or plate makes it stable then sometimes you can treat it like an internal splint and return to play pretty quickly in a matter of weeks. Maybe a month or two, but I think that would hasten it by a couple weeks based on being a non-dominant injury. It's not a season-ender."
While the Warriors have yet to share additional details regarding the injury, such as the exact location of the fracture and the type of procedure Paul will undergo, it appears likely the injury will not end Paul's first season with Golden State.