Sparks Star Kelsey Plum Sidelined Four Weeks With Lower Leg Injury, Will Miss WNBA All-Star
The Los Angeles Sparks finally have a star worth building around, and now they have to play without her for the next month.
Kelsey Plum will be sidelined for at least four weeks with a lower left leg injury, the team announced. She left Sunday’s game in Toronto with the leg nearly fully wrapped, and the Sparks will reevaluate her at the end of the four-week window.
The timing could not be worse. Plum, the 2022 WNBA MVP and two-time champion, is second in the league in scoring at 23.9 points per game and sixth in assists at 6.4. She was the engine of a Sparks team that finally looked like it had direction after years of irrelevance.
Now she will almost certainly miss the WNBA All-Star festivities, which fall inside the same four-week window. A two-time All-Star starter being a spectator at her own event is a brutal look for a league that has banked its summer marketing campaign on stars staying healthy.
This is also Plum’s second leg issue of the year. She missed games in May with a right ankle injury, and now the left leg is what gives out. At 31, with the wear of a heavy usage rate and overseas commitments behind her, the body is starting to push back.
The Sparks were never going to win the title this year. The path forward was to keep Plum healthy, develop the young pieces around her, and finish strong enough to attract a real free agent in the offseason. Every game Plum misses now makes that path narrower.
Here is the part Los Angeles has to confront. Plum signed with the Sparks to be the face of a franchise, not a player taped together every other week. If this becomes a pattern, the front office has to start asking harder questions about workload management and offseason rest, even if Plum herself wants to play every minute.
The Sparks will likely lean more on Cameron Brink, Dearica Hamby, and Rae Burrell during the absence. Brink in particular has a chance to grab a bigger role and remind people why she was a top draft pick before her own injury setbacks.
None of that replaces what Plum brings. She is the kind of player who creates her own shot in late-clock situations, drags defenders into rotations, and frees up the rest of the lineup. A WNBA backcourt without her looks completely different.
The hope, for the Sparks and the league, is that this really is just a four-week absence and not the start of something chronic. The reevaluation date will be the one to circle on the calendar. If Plum walks back into practice in a month and looks like herself, this is a manageable bump.
If she does not, the Sparks have a much bigger problem than a sub-.500 record. They have a franchise pillar whose body is starting to wave the white flag.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
