Malik Nabers' progress from knee injury should make Giants fans 'optimistic,' Long Island doctors say

A Long Island surgeon said the Giants’ medical team needs to watch Malik Nabers with “immense scrutiny” as he returns to action in these early stages of the preseason, but he added that Giants fans should be “optimistic” about the wide receiver playing at a high level at some point this season, perhaps even in time for the opener.

“The majority of athletes at the professional level after an ACL surgery are able to return to their pre-injury status,” Dr. Ajay Padaki, a sports medicine specialist at the Northwell Health Orthopaedic Institute in Great Neck, told Newsday.

He added that depending on the study, the rate of coming back to the same relative tier of performance and production is between 75% and 85%.

Nabers tore an ACL and meniscus in late September 2025 and had surgery to repair them in October. He reportedly had a second procedure to remove a cyclops lesion (in other words, scar tissue) from the area.

That put in doubt his return for the beginning of this summer’s training camp and his availability for the start of the regular season. Nabers, however, has been participating in drills most days as the Giants train at The Greenbrier in West Virginia and appears to be on track for Week 1.

Whether or not he will be back to full speed by then is tricky to answer. Padaki said it depends on how invasive the second surgery was; details of that procedure have not been made public.

“But I think Giants fans should be optimistic,” Padaki added. “We have no reason to doubt he will return to that [previous] level. It’s just that the time line may take some of this season to return to running routes with confidence and cutting and looking like the player he was prior to the injury.”

Brian DeVeaux, a physical therapist with Northwell’s STARS Rehabilitation and the senior sports clinical specialist at Hofstra University, told Newsday that Nabers’ recovery likely was always aimed at a Week 1 return, even if it was never announced publicly as such.

“A lot of times these guys — and we use this kind of approach at Hofstra, too — they use a time line that works backward,” he said. “You have an end point and you can better strategize through sports rehab to come up with milestone testing to progress through each stage .  .  . Rather than starting at the beginning and moving onward, they can put a time line in place and come up with a plan like a road map to work backward all the way to Day 1.”

Nabers isn’t the only premier player who has been on training camp fields seemingly ahead of schedule after major surgery. Patrick Mahomes of Kansas City is back from a torn ACL and Daniel Jones of Indianapolis is practicing after tearing an Achilles last fall.

The biggest risk for all of them is, obviously, re-injury.

“There is never a time we can say there is a 0% chance of having a re-tear,” Padaki said.

Added DeVeaux: “The No. 1 risk factor for any injury is a previous injury. You can have the perfect rehab, the perfect prevention program, but there is always risk out there.”

There certainly are things Nabers and the Giants can do to decrease those risks. Monitoring him both subjectively and objectively as he ramps up his participation is key to that.

“From the subjective side, they are seeing how he is feeling, whether there is any pain or sensations of weakness,” Padaki said. “On the objective side, they are looking to see if he has swelling after practice, whether he is having weakness when he is testing his quadriceps from one side to the other.”

“There is a lot of great technology out there like dynamometers,” DeVeaux said, referencing devices used to measure muscle strength and force output. Such isokinetic equipment can “look at strength and get a measure in terms of pounds of force and Newtons of force.”

That data is important for judging LSI — limb symmetry index — which tells the medical staff whether a patient is favoring one leg over the other.

Beyond the knee itself, though, both clinicians agreed that there will be mental hurdles for Nabers to overcome.

“There is an indubitable mental aspect to having a huge knee injury and surgery with a nine-to-12-month recovery,” Padaki said. “In younger athletes especially, they will have real mental anxiety about cutting when in their fresh memory, the last time they did, it caused them to miss a year or a year and a half in recovery time.”

DeVeaux said he likes to employ the TSK-11 questionnaire (which stands for Tampa scale for kinesiophobia) to judge an athlete’s fear as new stages of the recovery are introduced.

There also is something called a SANE questionnaire (single assessment numeric evaluation) that asks the athlete to rate whether they feel ready to proceed on a scale of 0 to 100. It essentially opens dialogue between the patient and the medical staff.

“If there is [fear or hesitation] then maybe a sports psychologist can come in,” DeVeaux said. “That’s where having a good sports medicine team is a great tool, too, for decision-making and any care that is needed.”

The ultimate goal, of course, is for this to be a one-time experience for any athlete. It doesn’t always work that way. Many suffer subsequent injuries, either to the originally damaged area or elsewhere because of the stresses from the initial injury.

Padaki stressed that there is no such thing as being “ahead of schedule” because every injury, surgery and patient is different. Recovery time can range from the short term, as it did for Adrian Peterson and Novak Djokovic, to very long, as with Joel Embiid and even Saquon Barkley, who required nearly two full years to get back to his full abilities.

Nabers appears to be on the right track for a full and robust return at this point.

It will be up to the Giants’ medical staff to keep him on it.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.