Abe Lucas practices for 1st time in 10 months. He’s OK with Seahawks’ easing him back
Abe Lucas was getting ready for practice. His first one in 10 months.
His coach, for whom he’s yet to play, walked up to him in the Seahawks’ locker room Wednesday morning. He picked up Lucas’ gear.
“These are shoulder pads,” Mike Macdonald joked to his starting right tackle.
Lucas is back. Practicing, anyway.
And he wants to know why everyone thinks he’s been way behind schedule in his return from knee surgery nine months ago.
“I had a knee surgery,” the Seahawks’ starting tackle since they drafted him in 2022 out of Washington State said Wednesday, “and that takes a little bit of time to heal.
“That’s basically it.”
Lucas returned to practice Wednesday for the first time in 10 months. The Everett native last practiced Dec. 29, two days before he and Seattle played in the final home game of the 2023 season on New Year’s Eve.
Lucas then had surgery on his knee. Coach Mike Macdonald said at the beginning of training camp in late July: “We were hoping it would go a little faster up to this point.”
That was three months ago.
The News Tribune asked Lucas Wednesday if his return has taken longer than he expected.
“I mean, if I could have taken a pill to get me back in three months, yeah, that would have been great. But that was just a very unrealistic,” he said.
“I don’t know where people got that from, that I was going to be back by training camp.”
The Seahawks officially designated Lucas to return to practice Wednesday of the physically-unable-to-perform list. NFL rules are that a player coming off the PUP list have a maximum of 21 days he can practice before his team must active him to the 53-man roster to play, or put him on injured reserve for the remainder of the season.
Macdonald reiterated Wednesday the Seahawks may use all of those 21 days to get Lucas ready to play. He said the team’s plan is for Lucas to make his season debut coming out of Seattle’s bye, in week 11 at San Francisco Nov. 17. That’s three games from now.
The Seahawks’ iffy offensive line has been needing him to shore up its edges protecting quarterback Geno Smith throwing. That’s been while Lucas has been pushing a conditioning sled across the indoor practice field, and otherwise spending more time in the team’s training room that athletic tape for the last six months.
“(We) get a new teammate out there,” Macdonald said.
“If you take a step back with Abe, all the stuff he’s been through over the last year, this guy has been working his tail off. And it’s not easy to be doing your own thing and training and strengthening a leg. This is a long grind back to where we sit today.
“I think he deserves a lot of credit to put himself in the situation to come back at this point in time. Should be really exciting to have him out there and doing his thing. We are going to ramp into it and be as smart as we can.
“I think we have a really good plan.”
What did Abe Lucas have?
The mystery continues on what exactly has been wrong with Lucas’ knee.
At one point last season, when Lucas was playing in only six of 17 games and missing from early September to the end of December, then-coach Pete Carroll called the 6-foot-6, 322-pound Lucas’ injury a “chronic” condition.
Yet the first four-time All-Pac-12 Conference offensive lineman in WSU’s history missed just one game in the four years he started for the Cougars.
Asked Wednesday what exactly was wrong with Lucas’ knee, Macdonald didn’t really answer.
“This is a serious injury, and so you’re going and you’re getting it repaired. And it’s like everybody’s timetable — this is new to me, too,” the rookie head coach said. “This is a serious injury, right when we got here. He’s coming off getting it fixed, and so things are kind of in the air. So things might change and you’re dealing with rehab timelines and people...it’s hard. You’re just going off educated decisions and making the best guesses you can.
“If I thought there was an opportunity when we first got going we could possibly have him at the beginning of the season and seems like the timeline got pushed back, I don’t think it’s anything he did that moved it back. I think it’s one of those things where timelines get moved. There’s strength with the leg with the ratios, all the smart people are telling me.
“So I think that’s just what was going on. It gets a little frustrating when the timelines shift but that’s just the nature of what we do.”
As the months he’s been sidelined have continued, speculation has included Lucas possibly having had a microfracture surgery on his knee. That arthroscopic procedure. according to Washington University Orthopedics in St. Louis, uses a small sharp pick to create a network of holes in the bone at the base of cartilage injury. These holes allow blood into the injured area to form a clot. Over time, this clot turns into organized tissue called fibrocartilage which fills in the injured area.
The time before a return to full performance following a micofracture surgery is described as long, nine to 12 months.
Macdonald was asked Wednesday if Lucas had a microfracture surgery.
“Shoot, I couldn’t tell ya,” the coach said. “Microfracture? I don’t...sorry.”
For Lucas, that’s all his past now. For his immediate future, he says he’s great practicing the next three weeks before playing for the first time since last Dec. 31.
“It’s part of the plan. It is what it is,” he said, with a shrug.
“I mean, it’s been a long time, you know.
“Yeah, I’m happy to be back.”
This story was originally published October 24, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
