The Kings may have avoided the kind of knee injury that can wreck a season, but Maxime Raynaud still faces an uncertain stretch after Saturday’s scare in the preseason loss to the Warriors.
Raynaud’s injury looked ugly in real time. He went down without contact, stayed on the floor in pain for several moments and eventually had to be taken off the court in a wheelchair. For a moment, it had the look of a much bigger problem.
On Sunday, Sacramento offered a clearer picture: an MRI showed a right patellar subluxation, and the second-year sophomore will be re-evaluated in two weeks.
Stanford Medicine’s Dr. Marc Safran broke down what that diagnosis could mean, and why it’s not as alarming as the first few seconds of the injury made it seem.
“Certainly when you see a non-contact injury and somebody grabs their knee, yeah, people start to worry about ACL and they think nine months and that's that," Dr. Safran said.
"But this is a different injury. It can oftentimes be treated without surgery.
So as you said, no injury is a good injury, but this one is better than some of the alternatives."
Raynaud’s size is part of why this matters. At 7-foot-1, he’s constantly putting stress on the knee area through jumping, landing, rebounding and shot-contesting, and Dr. Safran explained how those forces build.
“There's a lot of forces on the kneecap. Some of the highest forces in the body are from the kneecap itself, trying to jump and run, and those forces are magnified based on your weight and certainly height contributes to it.
So when we talk about doing things like walking on level surfaces, it's about one-half times your body weight across the kneecap. When you go upstairs, it's about three times your body weight.
When you go down it's five times your body weight.
"When you're running and jumping, that can get to six to eight times your body weight. So it's not so much if you're 7-foot-1 versus 6-foot-3, but it may be 250 pounds versus 200 pounds and there's a big difference there in the amount of forces across the kneecap."
Sacramento’s two-week re-evaluation window means Raynaud will miss the start of the 2026-27 NBA season while the team waits for more information. Dr. Safran said a return in two to three weeks is “not an unreasonable timeline,” though swelling could stretch that recovery to anywhere from eight weeks to three months.
There’s also the question of whether this becomes something Raynaud deals with again later on. Dr.
Safran said recurrence is possible, depending on the shape of the groove the kneecap sits in and how stretched the ligament becomes. He added that loose joints can make a player more vulnerable.
"I think those people tend to have more normal anatomy and so actually the likelihood of recurrence is lower than if it was a non-contact injury where he might have some anatomy that might put him at risk to have this happen."
Asked for the range of outcomes, Dr. Safran laid out the good, the bad and the much worse.
"The best-case scenario is the team said they're going to evaluate him in two weeks, so the best-case scenario is that he'll be playing in two weeks," Dr. Safran said.
"The worst-case scenario is that it may take him up to three months. I guess the really worst-case scenario is that, sometimes with a subluxation but more often with a dislocation, you can knock off a piece of cartilage in the knee, and sometimes that requires surgery to remove that piece of cartilage.
But that's pretty uncommon with a subluxation and more common with a true dislocation.
"But I guess the worst-case scenario would be needing surgery, which I think the likelihood of that is probably less than five percent. So the reality is it may take him as long as three months with non-operative treatment but as early as two weeks."
For now, the Kings will wait on that two-week checkup and hope this turns out to be the best of the options that were on the table.
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