Jock Landale Exits Saturday's Game With Hip Injury

The Atlanta Hawks are going to have to finish their Saturday night without Jock Landale. The veteran center caught a hip injury and has officially been ruled out for the rest of the game, according to Underdog NBA.

If you feel like you have seen Landale on an injury report recently, your memory is working perfectly. The guy has collected ailments like infinity stones over the last calendar year, dealing with ankle, shoulder, and calf issues before this latest hip problem.

"Underdog NBA reported: 'Status alert: Jock Landale (hip) won't return Saturday.'"

Before heading to the locker room, Landale was logging about 17.5 minutes a night in his first six games for Atlanta this season. He has been a steady, if unspectacular, rotation piece, posting a 48.7 effective field goal percentage while giving the starters a breather.

Losing a backup center in the middle of a game is not going to send shockwaves through the Eastern Conference playoff race, but it absolutely scrambles the live betting markets. Anyone holding a ticket on Landale's second-half rebounds just got handed a bad beat, and the Hawks now have to patch together their frontcourt rotation on the fly.

The immediate question is whether this is just a tweak or something that requires a wardrobe change into street clothes for the next few weeks. Atlanta will likely send him for imaging on Sunday, which means fantasy managers in deep leagues need to start looking at the waiver wire just in case.