NC State women’s hoops will miss Jada Boyd for ‘a couple of months’

Wes Moore said Wednesday that his team will begin the 2021-22 season shorthanded because forward Jada Boyd has a hand injury that will require her to miss “a couple of months, probably.” Boyd tore a tendon in her shooting hand.

This is an unhelpful development, because Kayla Jones isn’t fully recovered from the injury she sustained during the NCAA tournament last season, and Boyd would have been the one primarily filling that gap until Jones was good to go.

So Moore is going to have to be a little more creative with his lineups than he’d like to be between now and Januaryish, but the good news is that NC State has the talent to excel despite the setback to Boyd. That may mean a more guard-oriented look, which should still suit the team fine, and there will probably be an increased reliance on Camille Hobby in the frontcourt. She showed last year she can handle it.

Boyd’s setback is disappointing because the Wolfpack has a lot of big non-conference games in the first half of the season, but obviously the most important thing for a team with big long-term goals is that Boyd (and Jones) are healthy and back comfortably in the rotation toward the latter end of the regular season. None of the games State plays before the calendar turns will alter the outcome of its season.