It wasn’t much of a birthday present, that’s for sure. Marc Gasol turned 35 Wednesday. And judging by the way he left the court at Scotiabank Arena on Tuesday night — yanking himself from the game after experiencing what the team would later describe as a bout of hamstring “tightness” —it’s unlikely he woke up feeling like a younger man.
As Raptors coach Nick Nurse confirmed, Tuesday’s event was an aggravation of the hamstring injury that kept Gasol out of 12 games, a stint on the shelf that only ended a couple of weeks ago. And with the NBA trade deadline looming a week in the distance on Thursday, the big Spaniard’s latest health scare underlined an obvious item on the front office’s potential shopping list.