My heart kinda breaks for the guy because if he came back from his month-long layoff and finished the NBA Finals in good shape and healthy, he would probably be a force in this summer's FIBA tournaments - and Latvia, of all places, is
hosting one of the four
Olympic Qualifier Tournaments from July 2-7th, and hosts often win those. Their main competition there to make it to Paris is Brazil. So if he had played, he'd have had a solid chance to take Latvia to the Olympics and then play in it.
Latvia's team is ranked 6th in the world, having finished 5th in the FIBA World Cup last year without KP (and giving the eventual champions, Germany, as good a game in the QFs as the USA did in the semis, Germany winning both by 2). Their squad is captained by Davis Bertans'
older brother. Davis, meanwhile, is the only other Latvian NBA player besides KP. A healthy or at least playable KP would take them from "could maybe still make the tournament" to "legit medal contender who would give the USA a real game". And their country is only 1.8 million people, it's absolute insanity for them to have even a golden generation that's able to compete at this level in a well-funded globalized team sport. Shit, even Lithuania is 5 million.
But from the sounds of it, Porzingis is headed for offseason surgery, unavailability during the international season, and a slow return in the fall. I wanted him to get the chance to represent his (basketball-mad) country at the highest-profile sporting event in the world, nearly as much as I wanted him to make an impact for the Cs in the Finals. He's only played in one final FIBA tournament - EuroBasket 2017, where he finished as the tournament's blocks leader but his team was ousted in the QFs by a rampaging Slovenia (Donka was 18, Goran Dragic actually was the team's star), who were the eventual champions. A combination of unlucky circumstances has kept him away just about ever since. How much would he have relished another shot at Doncic And Friends (though Slovenia has to still qualify too, at the qualifier hosted by Greece)? Or even to give his country something to remember him by for the rest of his days? He won't have many better chances than he would have this summer to do something legendary in international ball.