Luka Doncic diagnosed with Grade 2 hamstring strain, out for remainder of season at least

This is exactly what the Lakers and their fans feared when they saw Luka Doncic pull up and grab his hamstring in the third quarter Thursday night.

Doncic has been diagnosed with a Grade 2 hamstring strain and will be out for the remainder of the regular season, the Lakers announced. While the Lakers did not discuss the playoffs — which begin April 18, just more than two weeks away — a Grade 2 strain typically takes at least three weeks to heal, and more often players are out for a month or more.

This injury could have a couple of significant impacts.

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The first is on the Lakers’ playoff seeding and first-round matchup. Los Angeles is currently the No. 3 seed in the West, just one game ahead of No. 4 seed Denver and 2.5 games ahead of No. 5 seed Houston (Minnesota is sixth). The advantage for the Lakers is that Denver has the toughest remaining schedule in the NBA, but the Lakers have some challenging games remaining in the final nine days of the season, including against the Thunder, Suns, and Warriors with Stephen Curry back in the lineup. If the Lakers go into any playoff series in the West without Doncic for at least the first few games, they will be heavy underdogs.

The other is Doncic’s MVP and First Team All-NBA case. Doncic has played in 64 games, one shy of the league’s mandated 65-game threshold to qualify for postseason awards. As it stands, if he misses the rest of the regular season, he would be ineligible for any postseason honors, even though voters would put him there. (ESPN’s MVP straw poll that came out Friday had Doncic fourth in that race.)

There is a potential exception for Doncic, the “extraordinary circumstances challenge.” That challenge states that if “it was impractical for the player to play in one or more of the [missed] games” and the player would have reached 65 games if he had played in those games, an independent arbiter (selected by the league and player’s union) can grant him an exception. Doncic missed two games in December for the birth of his child.

Doncic’s agent, Bill Duffy, said in a statement to ESPN’s Shams Charania that he would file that…

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Publish date : 2026-04-03 22:53:00

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