Medical Expert Offers Best and Worst-Cast Injury Scenarios for Raiders’ DT Christian Wilkins

The Raiders are hopeful that they will have their $110 million defensive tackle in the lineup this year, but it’s been well documented since the week of the draft that Christian Wilkins has experienced at least one setback since a broken bone in his foot ended his first season in Las Vegas.

Wilkins underwent surgery for a Jones fracture during the 2024 season and ended up back in a walking boot sometime around February, but not a lot is known about his recovery since.

The Raiders’ have been tight-lipped about Wilkins’ injury aside from Pete Carroll saying in May that it’s been “a long, challenging process.”

No official details have become available since Carroll’s statement, but a medical expert weighed in this week on the most likely best and worst-case scenarios for similar injuries to what Wilkins has been reported to be dealing with.

In an appearance on the Just Win podcast on Friday, renowned orthopedic sports surgeon Deepak Chona shared his thoughts on the reports around Wilkins’ injury.

These were the highlights of his conversation with The Athletic’s Ted Nguyen…

“Yeah, so they diagnosed him with a Jones Fracture. At least that’s what’s reported, and when that happens, it’s basically a break in the toe. But the important thing is the spot where the bone breaks has a little bit of a dicey blood supply. So what they did is most likely put a screw through the bone to basically compress it together and get it to heal. When that heals and when it goes smoothly, it’s often no problem…

The refracture rates, re-injury rates down the road are actually very low. You may remember Derrick Henry several years ago had this happen, you haven’t heard about it since. And that’s kind of the most common route that we see in the data…

The one hiccup here is that there is a rate, it’s about 20 percent or so of players having issues with this healing in the first place, and that’s even despite the surgery going well. So what I suspect or at least my concern level is somewhat raised for given that he was off of the boot and then he went back on it, was that maybe as they advanced him, he was having some “sort of symptoms and as a result, they sort of re-imaged or further image.

And it suggests that maybe it didn’t heal all the way around. If you think about the bone as a cylinder, if it heals all the way around, that’s going to be 100 percent, but we kind of grade it in terms of percentage of how much of it did unite. And the suspicion or the concern is, did a lower percentage of it actually really form bone there?

Now, in terms of the data, if he comes back and he’s healed, the refracture rates, as I mentioned, are quite low. So most players, once they come back, they’re pretty much able to stay back. The problem is just getting them back from the injury in the first place...

From what we’re hearing, it sounds like they expect him to be ready for training camp, but obviously, you know, the reports at this time of year are often optimistic, so it’s a little bit hard to judge that at face value...

Starting with the worst-case scenario… the worst case is that this bone is just not healing. And in that case, then it sometimes requires a revision surgery. Now, if he were undergoing that sort of thing, I would think that he would have had it already. I don’t say any of that to scare Raiders fans, just to kind of point out that that is in theory a possibility.

Since he is now off the boot, it suggests that he’s trending in the right direction and therefore I would suspect that as he probably continues to do that, you get progressively more healing of that foot, of that bone, and his foot can kind of regain some of the strength around it in the muscles, because when you’re not sort of training at an NFL level, you do lose some of that...

Now, the performance data when he comes back usually actually would be pretty good, especially given that the season is still three months out. So if he’s out there in training camp and kind of doing what would be normally expected for his position, I actually wouldn’t really have concerns that he would have a lingering performance impact with this. He’s had enough time removed from the injury and surgery itself that one would think he’d be pretty much ready to go.”