TORONTO — An already-thin Nuggets backcourt took another bad blow Monday night when Will Barton was forced out of the game with an injury.
The veteran shooting guard, who has been starting this season because the regular starter, Gary Harris, has been out, left the game in the third quarter with a sprained left ankle. He was in considerable pain when he hit the floor. Nearly the entire Nuggets team surrounded him as the training staff attended to him on the court.
Barton was immediately taken back to the locker room for X-rays, which came back negative. He tried to walk by himself but ultimately had to be helped back.
He’s day to day.
“Itap just sore, a bad sprain, a real bad sprain,” Barton said. “My foot stepped on one of the big guys’ feet from Toronto and just turned as soon as I touched it.”
Barton needed crutches to get around afterward but is taking a wait-and-see approach to his availability for Thursday’s game at Minnesota. He called the sprain a “mid-ankle” sprain, not a high ankle sprain, but he’ll know more Tuesday when it has sat overnight.
“Itap tough,” Nuggets forward Wilson Chandler said. “You lose any piece — Gary (Harris), Will Barton, (Darrell Arthur), whoever it is, we need them. They’re great players. We’re going to miss them.”
Murray’s return. Ticket requests piled so high that Jamal Murray scrambled to try to fill them all. Itap not every year — or any other year — that a kid from Kitchener, Ontario, comes back home to play in an NBA game just an hour and a half away from where his first seeds of stardom were planted.
But thatap exactly where Murray was Monday night. Back in Toronto, at the Air Canada Centre, where he had watched several NBA games but never played in one. He participated on Halloween night, with one point, two rebounds and two assists in 11 minutes off the bench.
“It was good. It was a lot of fun just to be back home,” Murray said. “But I am not really worried about that. It is more about the game. We lost a tough game for the second time.”
