The scariest thing that can happen to a big man is leg injuries. Out of all the archetypes in basketball, a traditional center can see their career derailed by lower-extremity mishaps. That makes Thomas Sorber’s last six months a little worrying.
The Oklahoma City Thunder added Sorber with the No. 15 pick of the 2025 NBA draft. The 19-year-old saw his sole collegiate season at Georgetown cut short due to turf toe. Still recovering from foot surgery, he didn’t suit up for OKC in the 2025 Summer League.
OK. Nothing crazy. It’d suck not to see Sorber play in that two-week environment, but purely from an entertainment perspective. The Thunder played it safe. And then, a couple of months later, their cautious approach was punished by the basketball pantheons.
The Thunder announced the brutal injury update that Sorber sustained a torn ACL in an offseason workout. He will miss the entire 2025-26 season. Such bad luck with training camp still a month away. Unfortunately, OKC is familiar with being in this spot. Chet Holmgren and Nikola Topic also missed their respective first year with injuries.
The Thunder had hope Sorber would show enough flashes in his limited minutes to feel confident enough to move on from Isaiah Hartenstein in the 2026 offseason. Now, if they stick with that approach, they’ll do so blindly with zero NBA data to back it up.
While a torn ACL isn’t the career-ender it was a decade ago, the missed time the injury adds is detrimental to Sorber. His final college game was on Feb. 15 against Butler. That means, if he’s cleared by then, roughly 18 months will pass between that game and the 2026 Summer League.
That should be when Sorber likely suits up for the first time with the Thunder. It’ll be 10 months since he sustained the knee injury. That said, if that’s not enough time, that could make his extended absence away from the court even longer.
Either way, being away from competitive basketball for that long is awful for Sorber. It’s one thing if he sustained the torn ACL after a healthy college season. It’s another when he already recently had a foot injury that was serious enough to knock him out for Georgetown’s final month and required surgery.
The extended absence shouldn’t affect Sorber’s long-term career. But his NBA aspirations are already off to a rough start. Let’s see if he can bounce back and enjoy some better injury luck from here on out.
