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Victor Wembanayama appears likely to play Game 4 vs. the Trail Blazers, a top sports doctor now predicts.

Victor Wembanyama’s Game 4 status is coming into focus after he missed Game 3, a sports doctor predicts. Wembanyama sat out Friday night’s Game 3 against the Portland Trail Blazers as expected, a concussion keeping the San Antonio Spurs‘ franchise big man sidelined for the first time this postseason. The Spurs won anyway, 120-108, reclaiming the series lead with the road victory. Now, as Sunday’s Game 4 approaches, a prominent sports medicine specialist is calling Wembanyama’s return a near-certainty.

Dr. David Chao, a former NFL team physician and sports injury analyst known online as Pro Football Doc, posted Friday that the Game 4 appearance appears settled. The team’s final call on Wembanyama’s availability could come just hours before tipoff, setting up a pivotal Game 4 decision for San Antonio.

“Wemby out tonight,” Chao wrote on his social media account. “Game 4 seems on the table and realistic.” In an earlier post, Chao described Wembanyama’s turnaround from what appeared to be a serious concussion suffered only Tuesday in Game 2 as a record-setting recovery from traumatic brain injury. Chao declared Wembanyama’s return “a done deal.”

Chao was responding to The Athletic‘s Jared Weiss, who reported that Wembanyama was running shooting drills alongside teammates at Friday morning’s Spurs shootaround in Portland, though at the time he remained listed as “questionable” for Game 3.

Victor Wembanyama’s Concussion and Road to Game 4

Wembanyama went down hard in Game 2 on Tuesday, all 7-foot-4 of him crashing head-first onto the floor at the 8:57 mark of the second quarter, as he drove to the hoop and appeared to get his legs tangled with veteran Portland guard Jrue Holiday.

Wembanyama seemed to lapse into unconsciousness as he lay face down under the basket, then sat there for several more minutes before unsteadily making his way into the tunnel. Sports medicine physician Dr. Jesse Morse had previously assessed the 2023-24 NBA Rookie of the Year as having a “VERY good chance” of a Game 4 return once clearance to travel to Portland confirmed that his symptoms must be trending the right direction.

Under NBA concussion protocol, a player must stay out of full basketball activities for a minimum of 48 hours and clear multiple symptom-free benchmarks before receiving sign-off from both the team physician and an independent league specialist. Game 4 tips off at 12:30 p.m. PT Sunday in Portland, roughly five days after Wembanyama’s injury and could prove to be the early end of the three- to 10-day window Morse originally outlined.

Wembanyama, 22, finished the regular season averaging 25.0 points, 11.5 rebounds, and 3.1 assists on 51.2 percent shooting, earning Defensive Player of the Year as the first unanimous selection in league history. In his postseason debut, he torched Portland for 35 points, a Spurs franchise record for a first playoff game.

Spurs Star Faces Warnings Despite Return Optimism

Not every voice in the medical community shares Chao’s confidence. Chris Nowinski, founding CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, reviewed the collision and landed in a different place entirely. “It was an ugly concussion,” Nowinski told Yahoo Sports‘ Tom Haberstroh. “His head bounced off the court aggressively.”

In an online video Friday, Nowinski offered further warnings to Wembanyama.

“While extremely rare, people his age and younger can suffer second-impact syndrome, which is the loss of autoregulation of the brain, rapid brain swelling after another hit to the head when the concussion hasn’t recovered,” the CTE specialist cautioned.

Nowinski noted that Wembanyama was slow to rise and lost his balance getting up after the hard fall. Those are two indications that the impact to his brain was significant. Nowinski argued the league’s 48-hour minimum is shaped more by the NBA’s desire to stick to its every-other-day game schedule than by neuroscience data.

“When you have these true superstars, the idea that they play the next game after suffering a clear concussion, to me, is incredibly short-sighted,” Nowinski told Haberstroh.

Broader data adds context. A review of recent NBA concussion cases put the average absence at 9.3 days with a median of seven, a window pointing toward Game 5 or 6, not Game 4. The series sits at 2-1 in San Antonio’s favor. The Spurs injury report for Game 4 was not yet released as of Saturday morning, but whether Wembanyama takes the floor Sunday in Portland is the most consequential injury call of the first round.