[killa]

SAN ANTONIO - Portland coach Nate McMillan hobbled out of the locker room on crutches Wednesday night, lamented the loss of another big man and said All-Star Brandon Roy is doubtful because of a sore shoulder.

Can the Trail Blazers possibly get any more banged-up?

"Unbelievable," McMillan said. "I don't even like to talk about it."

An already stunning list of injuries continues to grow for the Trail Blazers. The injuries are threatening what has been a promising season for one of the best teams in the Western Conference.

Center Joel Przybilla is the latest casualty, rupturing a patella tendon in his right leg after taking a hard fall in Tuesday night's victory over Dallas. He is out indefinitely just nine games after taking over for Greg Oden, who injured his left knee earlier this month.

Oden is out for the season after surgery to repair a left patella fracture. Losing Przybilla and Oden leaves Portland without a true center.

Roy was also injured against the Mavericks and didn't play against the San Antonio Spurs because of a bothersome left shoulder. The Trail Blazers' leading scorer was expected to undergo tests when the team returned to Portland.

McMillan said Roy was day to day. In addition to Oden and Przybilla, forward Rudy Fernandez is expected to miss extended time because of back pain.

Portland forwards Travis Outlaw (foot), Nicolas Batum (shoulder) and guard Patrick Mills (foot) were already out after undergoing surgery.

Given the injury woes, the league granted Portland a hardship exemption last week that allowed the Trail Blazers to sign a 16th player. McMillan, who is on crutches while recovering from a ruptured Achilles' tendon, said the Trail Blazers would likely explore getting another exemption.

Juwan Howard, who has averaged just 13 minutes this season, made his first start Wednesday in place of Przybilla. Jerryd Bayless started in place of Roy.

"We're going to need them to step up and play, kind of throw them in the fire," McMillan said. "It's the situation we're dealing with."

Portland began Wednesday's game 18-12 and just two games behind Denver in the Northwest Division.

Trail Blazers add Roy to growing list of injuries - Sports- nbcsports.msnbc.com
____________________
Wirelessly Posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)