DETROIT — Lonnie Walker IV missed his 12th straight game Tuesday and is expected to sit out Nos. 13 and 14 in a row as well.
While Walker has been rehabbing a hamstring injury, he’d initially been expected to make the trip to face the Pistons but came down with an illness.
“Yeah, Lonnie didn’t join us here in Detroit. The thought was he was going to travel with us. Had a little setback because of a virus,” coach Jacque Vaughn said before the Nets’ 118-112 win. “So he’s been sick. And so really the last, I’m going to say three days, he hasn’t been able to be on court. And so again, he was supposed to be with us on this trip to get a workout in, wasn’t able to do that.
“So we’ve kind of pushed his availability back. We’ll check on him when [the team] gets home and hopefully he can continue towards working back on the court. But you won’t see him this week.”
That means Walker will miss not only the second night of this back-to-back Wednesday at home against the Bucks, but at least the first date of their four-game road trip Friday in Washington.
He could conceivably join the Nets on that trek.
For years, Joe Harris played the role of designated shooter in Brooklyn.
But now in Detroit, he’s playing a different role for the struggling young Pistons: sage veteran leader, and grown-up in the room.
Harris, 32, is the third-oldest on the roster and was often the oldest on the court until Bojan Bogdanovic returned.
“Yeah, I’m going into like a different iteration of my career, I’d say, where I’m a veteran. [Sometimes] I’m by far the oldest guy,” Harris told The Post. “That’s like my thing now. Veteran presence here, trying to impart that vocal leadership role with these guys. Needless to say, it’s been tough. This has been a difficult season for a lot of reasons, losing this much. Nobody in here is used to losing.
“My first year in Brooklyn, there was some months where it felt like we did not [win], we could’ve been easily in this same spot. That’s why I’m trying to tell these guys, I’m like, ‘Hey, you’re gonna look back on this time as a really formative time in your development as an NBA player. You’re learning a lot.’ ”
Harris played 432 games over seven seasons in Brooklyn, averaging 11.6 points on scalding 44 percent shooting from deep.
Now he’s played just 12 games, averaging 2.3 points in 11.5 minutes per game.
He sees some similarities to his early Nets teams, albeit with more high-end upside.
“There’s a lot of serious talent. It’s just nobody’s really played,” he said. “Our average age of our starting five is around 21 ½ years old, which is crazy. It’ll hopefully click somewhere.”, like Spencer (Dinwiddie) and myself, Caris (LeVert) and D’Angelo (Russell).
“At some point you start to play, you’ll feel more confident. … Then you go from 21 wins to 29 to 43 and so on and so forth. It just sucks in the beginning.”
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