A hurting shoulder coupled with a bone spur on his knee had certainly made Phoenix Super LPG’s Javee Mocon a banged up player.
Mocon could only watch painfully from the sidelines how the Fuel Masters absorbed losses in the ongoing Philippine Basketball Association Governors’ Cup.
The Fuel Masters had lost four of their five games so far and Mocon could only share the pain.
“Probably it’s more painful than the injury,” said Mocon, who underwent surgery to remove a bone spur on his knee. “But you can’t do anything even if you wanted to help them.”
Mocon had missed the games of the Fuel Masters in the season-ending tournament, but is now preparing for his return.
“We didn’t know that there’s a bone spur. So even though we’re doing continuous rehab, it only gets worse and there’s a swelling on the knee,” said Mocon.
According to Mocon, they’ll start doing on-court exercises on February 8. He just came off a week from surgery, just to minimize the swelling and had taken anti-inflammatory and then put some ice on the injured knee.
But he had already started doing some conditioning in preparation for his return.
“Honestly, I haven’t played 5-on-5 since December,” Mocon said in an exclusive interview with Daily Tribune. “We’re really looking for the source of pain and then, it was only last week where we found out where the source of the pain was.”
“I miss helping the team. I know, they can win even without me, but I wanted to make a contribution for us to win games,”
According to Mocon, the knee injury wasn’t the only one that has hurt him the past months as even his shoulder has bothered him for quite some time.
“If you watched the video against Magnolia (last conference) during an incidental contact with Aris Dionisio, I played right away as if I didn’t get hurt,” added Mocon.
“But after the game, I lost the adrenalin and that’s the only time I felt the pain. So aside from the knee injury, I underwent rehab on my shoulder. They injected collagen for fast recovery. A lot of things had happened to me lately.”