Amis injured; out at least one month
The early progress of the Hawaii basketball team has hit a speed bump.
Bill Amis, the team’s leading scorer and rebounder, has been diagnosed with a stress fracture in the middle toe of his right foot – an injury that will keep him out of action for at least one month.
“It’s very frustrating,” said Amis, who redshirted the 2009-10 season due to an unrelated foot injury. “Just have to hope I can get back out there soon to help the team.”
The Warriors are off to a 4-0 start this season, and Amis has played a key role. He leads the team in scoring with 15.8 points per game, and rebounding with 6.8 per game.
The 6-foot-9 senior forward is also a team captain and one of the vocal leaders of an otherwise young roster.
“It’s going to hurt us a little bit in the short term,” Hawaii head coach Gib Arnold said. “But we’re looking at it to try and get as much positive as we can out of it. We’re thinking that could help us in the long term. A lot of the freshmen will play more minutes than they probably would have.”
Arnold added that he will likely use a variety of players and lineups to make up for Amis’ overall value.
“It’ll definitely be a combination of players,” Arnold said. “We’re not going to send one guy out there to play 30 minutes a game.”
Amis said his toe started to hurt during the season-opening Rainbow Classic, and it got worse in the team’s last game, an 83-69 victory over Central Arkansas on Nov. 19.
His right foot was placed in a protective boot following that game, and the stress fracture was discovered the next day.
Can bump Thomas to the 4 and be able to cover Amisʻs minutes by cycling in bench. Wiseman proved he can play bigger minutes without hurting them; Johnson can guard the 3 spot; Joaquim is starting to round into shape.
As Salter gets back into the mix, this allows Arnold to experiment with Salter/Miles/Thompson and Johnson/Barnes/Wiseman combos for a few weeks.
Though unfortunate, we will get to see where Brumfield is health-wise. This injury may prompt him to assert himself and identify his role and begin to carve it out.
To have the senior captain/leading scorer go down and still know viable options exist speaks volumes about how far this program has come in a year.
What a bummer. I guess with Amis being out for awhile we’ll see different line-up combinations before the WAC season. Besides missing his scoring and rebounding you think they’ll miss his experience even more?