A conversation with a surgeon about Taylor Hendricks’ injury — and timeline for recovery

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A fibula fracture and dislocated ankle is not a common basketball injury but the way that the injury happened to Utah Jazz second-year forward Taylor Hendricks is not something that is completely out of the ordinary.
Frankly, the way that it happened is something that we’ve all probably experienced. You’re walking along and for whatever reason you don’t pick up one of your feet quite enough and your toe skids across the ground. So much of the time when something like that happens, you catch yourself and trip up a little bit. Sometimes it’s a little more dramatic and you might trip and fall. That could sometimes lead to an ankle sprain.
But, if someone is running, and they’re dealing with a much larger frame than the average person and rather than catching themselves, all of their weight comes down onto their foot and ankle, well, that’s when you end up with a much, much worse injury.
In speaking with Kenneth Jung, MD, an orthopedic foot and ankle surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Kerlan-Jobe Institute in Los Angeles and foot and ankle consultant to the Los Angeles Lakers, he told me to imagine that the foot operates as a dial relative to the lower leg, while all being tightly connected. When Hendricks landed, quite a few things happened all at once. His foot was turned along that dial, tightening everything and pulling, and with the addition of his body weight coming down on his leg, that led to not only a broken bone but also ligament damage.
“As you twist that dial relative to your lower leg, you’re either gonna break a bone or tear a ligament,” Jung said. “And the more you do, the chances of it being unstable or dislocating increases. So obviously, he’s a big guy. It’s the amount of the amount of force that he lands with.”
A lot of people have been wondering if there was ligament damage that would need to be addressed with this injury and Jung said that because of the description of the injury from the Jazz, ligament damage is implied and also noted that even if there were tears in ligaments that required suturing that it would all be done during the same surgical procedure.
“To get a dislocation, that means things were torn, ligament wise,” he said. “The goal of surgery is to restore the stability and the alignment of all the bones in the joint in order for the ligaments to heal properly. Sometimes you’ll actually put sutures into the ligaments to pair them together, or you put sutures into the bone to restore that alignment, but all those would be addressed at the same time.”
As far as recovery goes, since Hendricks is a young and healthy professional athlete who will be able to maintain good nutrition and everything else that will go into a high level of care as he recovers, that means that there shouldn’t be anything holding him back from making a full recovery. But it will be a long road.
“I usually tell people it’s a minimum of three months before you’re probably doing light workouts and stuff like that,” Jung said. “Then everything else, it’s kind of sport specific.”
Moving from light workouts to heavy workouts can take months as well, as each person is different. Jung had mentioned that if the Jazz were a team that was going to be trying to get Hendricks back for the playoffs, that it would mean a more intensive and focused rehab. I assured Jung that in this case, the team would not be rushing recovery in hopes of having Hendricks back for a postseason run and he said that boded well for recovery.
“For a return to play it depends on, like you said, playoffs and things like that,” Jung said. “But if playoffs really aren’t in the picture, then there’s no need to rush him back, you can just let him recover. I’d expect he’d be ready to roll next season.”
The Jazz announced on Nov. 6 that Hendricks underwent successful surgery at the University of Utah Orthopedic Center in Salt Lake City to repair the fractured right fibula and ankle dislocation.
He is expected to miss the rest of the 2024-25 season.
“I told y’all he was skilled. I told y’all he was good and could play,” — Jordan Clarkson on rookie Kyle Filipowski.