WASHINGTON — His right knee wasn’t improving, the discomfort wasn’t going away, so forward Javonte Green felt like Wednesday was the right time.
After all, the Bulls go to Paris next week to play one game, then soon after comes the All-Star break. If there was a good time to get a quick cleanup surgery, why not now?
“He obviously had that bone bruise, which was causing him some problems,’’ coach Billy Donovan said. “He did swell from it. Medical guys thought that this was something that could be managed if we backed off of him. They had a bunch of different therapies that they could try to do. They did that, and there really wasn’t much progress after a week.
“Given Javonte’s options with where we’re at in the season ... obviously it was Javonte’s decision to do it, but I didn’t think from what I got from medical, and even what I got from Javonte, that there was a lot of progress with the interaction of just resting him.’’
It doesn’t hurt that Green had the surgery during one of the weaker stretches of the schedule. He’ll be re-evaluated in two weeks, and the initial thoughts are that he’ll miss about a month.
His teammates would love to have him on the court, but, like point guard Lonzo Ball, Green is now out of sight, out of mind.
While there were no updates on Ball (left knee) before the game against the Wizards, veterans such as Nikola Vucevic are carrying on like he won’t be back this season.
“You wish you had everybody, but whenever guys are missing time — whether it’s a short time or long — you just have to figure out things without them,’’ Vucevic said. “That’s part of it. Obviously, we know what Lonzo brings to this team and how much he would help us, but we haven’t had him since the beginning, so we can’t think about, ‘Oh, when he gets back, we’ll be so-and-so.’
“We have to play now; we have to figure it out now. You don’t play thinking about that. We still have a lot of very good players on this team and ways to be good even with guys missing.’’
DeRozan out
Forward DeMar DeRozan (right quadriceps), who didn’t play against Washington, missed his first game of the season.
The hope was that the injury wasn’t serious, but the medical staff just wanted to be cautious with the Bulls’ leading scorer.
“Anytime it’s a strain like that, he’s going to want to —and medical, too — just make sure it’s not something that lingers, that he reaggravates, and it sets him back even further,’’ Donovan said. “He still has some discomfort there. We don’t feel like it’s a major strain or a major tear, anything like that.
“I think they’ll keep progressing him and pushing him, see how he responds. But he’s still sore from the other day.’’
DeRozan had been dealing with the quadriceps problem for a few weeks, but he aggravated it on a fall in the third quarter Monday against the Celtics.
The last game DeRozan sat out because of injury came last season on March 24. He also missed the regular-season finale in Minnesota, but that was a rest day for all the veteran starters because it was a meaningless game.
