The Orlando Magic said Sunday that Dwight Howard will rest his injured back for the rest of the regular season and be re-evaluated after that, but the team is preparing for the possibility that Howard won’t even be back for the playoffs. Magic coach Stan Van Gundy, in fact, suggested that Howard being ready for the postseason is just a 50-50 proposition.
“Look, any time you have a guy on that kind of timetable you've got to assume that the playoffs are a 50-50 thing,” Van Gundy said, per the Orlando Sentinel. “So we've got to go forward assuming that what's in our locker room is our team going forward.”
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Van Gundy, the Sentinel reports, met with seven veteran Magic players this past weekend to discuss moving forward in light of Howard’s questionable status.
“One of the things we have to do with the group that's in the locker room is try to get better with this group that's in there and just play,” co-captain Jameer Nelson said. “Anything else we can't control. We can't worry about anything else because we've already had enough things going on in the course of the season.”
Magic GM Otis Smith, meanwhile, is denying that the team’s medical staff had misdiagnosed Howard’s condition, as some have speculated. The Magic announced Friday night, after Howard received a second opinion in L.A. from spine surgeon Robert Watkins, that their center had a herniated disk.
But, Smith said, “The diagnosis really didn't change from one location to the other.”
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