Nae'Qwan Tomlin out 3-4 weeks for Cavs with back injury
TLDR: Cavs forward Nae'Qwan Tomlin has a lower back stress reaction and won't be re-evaluated for 3-4 weeks, so a guy Kenny Atkinson planned to play is gone for opening month.
Tomlin missed all of preseason without much explanation. On Tuesday the beat finally got the diagnosis.
An MRI at Cleveland Clinic Sports Medicine confirmed the stress reaction. Do the math on that timeline and it gets worse. Even if the 3-week re-evaluation goes perfectly and he's cleared right then, Tomlin still misses at least the first 11 games of the season. A re-evaluation isn't a return date either. Back injuries on a guy whose whole game is bouncing around don't usually speed up.
This isn't a 15th man getting hurt. Tomlin played 64 games for Cleveland last season, putting up 5.8 points, 2.9 rebounds and 0.5 blocks in about 16 minutes a night as the energy guy off the bench. The Cavs liked him enough to move him off his two-way deal in February and give him a 2-year, $3 million fully guaranteed standard contract. That's a real bet on a 25-year-old who took the long road to the league.
That's the part that hurts. Cleveland's frontcourt is built around its top-end bigs, and the minutes behind them are where a guy like Tomlin earns his keep: soaking up fouls, switching, running the floor when the starters sit. Take him away and those minutes go to someone the staff trusts less, right as the schedule opens up and every game in the East counts the same in October as it does in April.
That's Atkinson telling you this was a planned piece of the rotation, not a flier at the end of the bench. Now he has to rework how he spreads the big-man minutes on the fly, before the Cavs have even played a regular-season game.
What to watch: who takes Tomlin's backup minutes in the first couple weeks, and whether there's any update when that 3-4 week window closes in mid-November. If the re-evaluation turns into another few weeks, Cleveland's depth up front goes from annoying to a real problem.