Kristaps Porzingis is out indefinitely due to illness, according to Golden State's injury report. What illness? That question is the subject of some controversy.
Porzingis has been broadly unwell since the spring of 2025, when he was with the Boston Celtics and found himself suffering from extreme exhaustion toward the end of the regular season. Boston was bounced in the Eastern Conference semifinals last season, Porzingis was a shell of himself, and over the summer he was diagnosed by doctors with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS. A key part of that sentence is "by doctors." According to Fred Katz of The Athletic, who reported on Porzingis's condition this past October, it was doctors who made the diagnosis, and it was doctors who outlined diet and lifestyle practices for managing the condition. His season so far has been rough: With the Atlanta Hawks, Porzingis played just 17 of 53 games, and while his production was respectable, he was limited to a career-low 24 minutes per game.
Warriors head coach Steve Kerr seems to have his own sources for gathering medical information. In an interview with local radio Friday evening, he described his process. "When I heard about the trade, I read about the POTS diagnosis," said Kerr, who probably does not have a medical library and was almost certainly typing shit into an internet browser. For more information, Kerr called Onsi Saleh, the former Warriors vice president who's presently the general manager of the Hawks, the franchise that was at that moment in the process of trading Porzingis to the Warriors. "He's a good friend of mine and I said 'Is this POTS story real?' And he said, 'It’s actually not POTS.' That was some misinformation that was out there. I don’t know if anybody’s asked him about it."
Whatever conflicting diagnosis these two basketball minds developed, it was apparently minor enough to support the Warriors acquiring Porzingis. After the teams had completed the trade, Kerr was confident that Porzingis would be able to jump right in and play important minutes for Golden State. "I don't think we would've made the trade if we didn't think he could be healthy and consistent in terms of being in the lineup," Kerr insisted on Feb. 5, per ESPN. Kerr explained that the Warriors medical staff had done their "due diligence" on Porzingis, and that the team expected him to be back in the lineup soon. "That's the plan," said Kerr.
In nine games since the transaction, Porzingis has played just 17 minutes, all of them in a lopsided Feb. 19 loss to the visiting Celtics. The big Latvian was out again Saturday night when the Warriors, also sans Stephen Curry, were thrashed 129-101 by the Los Angeles Lakers, another top-heavy Western Conference mediocrity. With Curry and Porzingis stuck on the shelf, the Warriors have lost five of their last nine and remain in the Western Conference's eighth seed, failing to gain ground on the couple of middling teams between them and the all-important and extremely gettable sixth seed. Fortunately for the Warriors, because a full third of the NBA is already tanking, it will be basically impossible for them to fall out of the play-in.
Kerr was confident on Friday that whatever was keeping his new center out was more flu-like than POTS-like. "He was just sick," Kerr said, in the ill-advised radio session. "He was sick enough where he was losing a lot of fluid and contagious, so we just kept him home and he’s doing a lot better now." Porzingis cannot have been doing that much better: 24 hours later, he was still too ill to compete for the Warriors.
Someone—possibly even a real doctor—finally spoke to Kerr. The Warriors head coach has been reminded that he is a basketball man. "It's a medical issue way beyond my capabilities explaining anything," said Kerr, when ruling Porzingis out of the Lakers game. "He's sick. He won't play. We will keep monitoring him." When asked to revisit his amateur diagnosis, Kerr rejected his earlier rejection. "It was a stupid mistake by me to talk about something I'm not qualified to talk about. Even trying to discuss the diagnosis, that was a mistake. I need to leave that to professionals."
POTS sounds pretty miserable. Porzingis said the condition hit him "like a truck," and that his heart rate would spike up to 130 beats per minute just from standing up, a common symptom of POTS caused by the body's inability to "coordinate the balancing act of blood vessel constriction and heart rate response." Those with POTS often experience dizziness and extreme fatigue. The condition can be triggered by bacterial or viral infections, and so naturally complaints have risen since the pandemic, among sufferers of long COVID.
Diagnosing it can be tricky: Doctors will run something called a tilt table test, which sounds like a chilled-out version of the infamous NASA gimbal rig, and is designed to trigger symptoms. This procedure, which requires strapping a patient flat on a rotatable table, seems like it would be logistically complicated for a patient who is in the world's 99th percentile for height. Researchers are still working to understand POTS in the post-COVID world. In the meantime, Kerr can focus on the active players he does have, and leave the medical reports to someone with a medical degree.
