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Toronto • Jazz point guard Mo Williams will try to play Monday against the Raptors after missing Saturday's home win over Phoenix with a strained right adductor muscle.
"I feel good enough to go," Williams said, "so if I feel good enough to go, even if I'm not 100 [percent] I'm going to go."
The Jazz are winless in four road games, and have their best opportunity of the young season Monday to break that streak when they go up against a 1-5 Raptors team, which will be without three key players: Kyle Lowry, Landry Fields and Alan Anderson.
Williams leads the Jazz (3-4) with 16.8 points per game, but left Friday's game at Denver in the third quarter. He said Monday he felt the injury, which forced him to miss two preseason games, flare up while defending Nuggets' point guard Ty Lawson. Lawson cut back "three or four times in one possession" and Williams kept cutting him off. The last time, he said, he felt it.
"It's like somebody took a pin and kind of poked you with a pin," he said. "It was that fast, it wasn't nothing that was hurting for a long time it was like somebody just poked me."
The adductor is the leg muscle in the groin area that keeps legs pulled in (not to be confused with the abductor, which provides the counterbalance of pulling the leg outward). Williams said the muscle first bothered him in 2010's training camp, when he was still with Cleveland. He didn't have adductor issues last season with the Clippers, he said.
Williams said he was getting around-the-clock treatment from Jazz trainers Gary Briggs and Brian Zettler, including 4 and 5 a.m. sessions.
Treatments include icing and laser techniques, Williams said, in an effort "to speed up the process. I don't like to miss games, so whatever I got to do to get back on the floor to help these guys. I can't help them from the bench."
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