SALT LAKE CITY — Everyone had noticed Mirza Teletovic wasn’t feeling like himself lately.
But, at the same time, no one on the Nets ever would have guessed they would get the news they did early Friday morning, when it was announced the Bosnian power forward would miss the rest of the season after the discovery of blood clots in his lungs.
“It was very shocking,” Joe Johnson said, “because I’ve honestly never heard of athletes, especially when you are working out and training hard every day, catching blood clots.
“It’s random and just to hear that and then hear some of the things that he said over the course of the past week of so about how he can’t breathe. … It’s kind of scary.”
Johnson and the rest of the Nets faced the Jazz inside Energy Solutions Arena on Saturday night in the first game Teletovic will be missing after he checked himself out of Thursday’s 123-84 blowout loss to the Clippers in Los Angeles and was taken to California Medical Center after complaining of shortness of breath.
But that wasn’t the first time Teletovic had said that recently, as several of his teammates said he had been experiencing issues for the past few games.
Rookie Bojan Bogdanovic — born in Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the same town as Teletovic — said he feels badly for Teletovic, his close friend, who has been helping make Bogdanovic’s transition to the U.S. as easy as possible.
“It surprised me a lot because I knew he had some problems, but he told me that he wasn’t in good shape and he told me that’s the problem,” Bogdanovic said. “But at the end [of the day], it’s a big problem for him and for us.”
The initial word after Thursday’s game was that Teletovic had avoided any serious ailment, and Teletovic even tweeted early Friday morning that he had “a small problem, but now everything is OK.”
That was before the results of a CT scan came back and revealed blood clots — a scan that Nets trainer Tim Walsh told him to get, according to coach Lionel Hollins.
“Anytime there’s something devastating like that, it’s shocking,” Hollins said. “It’s shocking for a guy to have an issue like that.
“The good thing is that Tim went with him. Tim made him do a CT scan, and they found out about it because he could’ve gotten on the plane and could’ve actually died. So it’s all good in that respect, but it is devastating for him and his family.”
After becoming a key part of the rotation last season under Jason Kidd, averaging 8.6 points per game on 39 percent shooting from 3-point range, Teletovic had been struggling with his stroke all season. He was shooting 38 percent and 32 percent from 3-point range — including 32.9 percent and 30.6 percent from behind the arc in January. He scored in double figures just twice in 12 games this month.
“I think it kind of explains why he was struggling in games,” Mason Plumlee said. “It’s like, ‘Wow, that makes sense,’ because he is a better player than he was playing, and you feel for him because he was trying to fight through it.
“But, looking back, it was tough and admirable of him, but it’s more important that he’s taking care of his health.”
Even with his shooting struggles this season, Teletovic was a threat opposing teams took seriously. A long-range shooter who never has seen a shot he didn’t have the confidence to take, Teletovic was the one big the Nets had that consistently could shoot from deep and space the floor.
Now rookie Cory Jefferson is going to get the first shot at replacing him, but it undoubtedly will be hard for the Nets to do so, making their chances of hanging onto one of the final playoff spots in the Eastern Conference that much harder.
“Last year, there were games where he would just shoot us back into the game,” Plumlee said. “We would be down double-digits, and he doesn’t just hit open threes … he can hit momentum-changing threes.
“He can hit two, three in a row, hit one with a guy on him, at the end of the shot clock … the same way Joe bails us out a lot, he could hit bail out shots, and it’s a tough loss.”