Gordon Hayward will start for the Charlotte Hornets on Wednesday in the team’s regular season opener in Cleveland, he told media on Tuesday. Hayward suffered a broken finger in the team’s second preseason game against the Toronto Raptors and missed nearly a week of practice and the team’s final two preseason contests.
“It’s obviously still broken but I’m going to play and just play through it, basically,” he said. “It’s something where I understand what happened to it, what the injury is and I just got to kind of play through it. There’s no risk to further damage by playing so it’s a pain tolerance type deal and we’re going to make it work.”
Hayward was only off the court for four days as he returned on Friday, Dec. 18, to do individual workouts and test his hand, leading to him rejoining the team on Monday and Tuesday as a full participant in practice ahead of Wednesday’s game.
“I’ve been doing shooting workouts,” Hayward said. “I went through practice the last couple of days and it should be good. It should good. Like I said, it’s obviously still broken so if it gets hit, it’s going to hurt and it’ll hurt a lot but it’s something we’re just going to have to manage and play through.”
The injury, which is on the pinky finger of his right hand, can not worsen, as Hayward noted, and will simply be a matter of pain tolerance moving forward.
“It’s a fracture so that’s something that just takes time to heal,” he said. “We have a great medical staff here. They’re unbelievable so I wouldn’t be playing if they didn’t have confidence that everything was going to be ok and they do. It’s just going to be something that we manage and continue to work on and keep an eye on and do treatment on but we should be good to go.”
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