EL SEGUNDO, Calif. -- The Lakers kicked Nick Young out of practice Thursday. He was sick -- probably from traveling across time zones recently, he suspected -- and they didn't want him getting any of his teammates sick.
Would he play Friday against the San Antonio Spurs? It wasn't clear at the time, and even if he did play, Lakers coach Luke Walton said, "We didn't know how much we were going to be able to get out of him."
But Walton and assistant coach Brian Shaw told Young that if Michael Jordan could play well with the flu -- as Jordan famously did by scoring 38 while quite ill in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals -- then so could Young.