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Puka Nacua will have a knee MRI after the Rams' Week 9 win
The Rams' leading receiver hurt his knee during a 150-yard game at Washington. Monday's MRI will tell Los Angeles how much of its season is still in front of it.
Los Angeles Rams wide receiver Puka Nacua suffered a knee injury in Sunday’s 20-13 win at Washington and will undergo an MRI on Monday, Mike Garafolo of NFL Network reported.
The injury came on Nacua’s busiest day of the season. He caught 14 passes for a season-high 150 yards and a touchdown and added 20 rushing yards, accounting for 150 of quarterback Matthew Stafford’s 228 passing yards, the Rams’ official site reported. The win was the Rams’ third in a row and moved them above .500 for the first time in 2026. Ian Rapoport followed with the injury on NFL Network’s “Good Morning Football” on Monday morning, NFL.com reported.
The MRI matters more than the box score. Nacua is the only reliable target left in a receiving corps that lost Davante Adams to injured reserve in October after hamstring surgery, and he has lost time to a knee injury before. A sprained posterior cruciate ligament in the 2024 opener cost him five games. The Rams are 5-4, tied with Seattle and trailing 7-1 San Francisco in the NFC West, and Sunday was the first time all season they held a winning record.
Nacua’s knee problems date to training camp in 2024, when he burst the bursa sac in his right knee and missed the preseason. He returned for the opener, sprained the PCL in the second quarter and landed on injured reserve for five weeks, his career biography shows. He missed two more games this season with a hip issue later described as a pre-hernia, sitting out Weeks 2 and 3 before he returned to catch nine passes for 125 yards in a Week 4 win at Philadelphia. The 2026 knee injury is at least the third separate issue to threaten his availability in 13 months.
The Rams drafted Nacua in the fifth round in 2023, 177th overall, and he set the NFL rookie records for receptions and receiving yards in his first year: 105 catches, 1,486 yards. He added 181 receiving yards in a wild-card loss to Detroit. Last season he led the league with 129 receptions, finished second with 1,715 yards and was a unanimous first-team All-Pro, and the Rams reached the NFC Championship Game before losing to Seattle 31-27. He caught nine passes for 165 yards in that defeat. His peers voted him the seventh-best player in the NFL on the Top 100 list this offseason.
That is the player the Rams have built their offense around. With Adams and tight end Terrance Ferguson both out, Nacua has caught 33 passes for 298 yards and three touchdowns over the last three games. Stafford threw him 14 targets Sunday, and Nacua produced 150 of his 228 passing yards. The rest of the roster combined for 78. Ferguson had returned to practice Wednesday from an ankle injury, then pulled a hamstring Friday and was ruled out, ESPN’s injury listing noted.
Nacua’s injury is the latest in a season that has stretched the Rams’ depth. Kicker Blake Grupe tore his anterior cruciate ligament in Week 6 and is out for the season. Cornerback Jaylen Watson went on injured reserve Saturday with a shoulder injury. Defensive linemen Kobie Turner and Poona Ford and running back Dean Connors are on IR too. The Rams listed at least 10 players on injured reserve before Sunday’s kickoff, Adams among them.
The schedule does not let up. Los Angeles plays at Arizona on Nov. 15, then hosts Green Bay on Nov. 25 and Kansas City on Dec. 3. If Nacua misses time, an offense already without Adams and Ferguson turns to running back Kyren Williams, who has 593 yards, and whatever Stafford can find in a receiving room that has thinned by the week. The Rams have not disclosed the severity of Nacua’s injury.
The MRI lands the day before the NFL trade deadline, which closes Tuesday at 4 p.m. ET. If the scan comes back clean, the Rams can stand pat with a 5-4 team that has won three straight. If it does not, the front office has a day to find a receiver for a club that just lost the one it cannot replace. The timeline turns a medical test into a roster decision.
Garafolo’s report did not specify which knee or whether a ligament is involved. Nacua was still on the field in the fourth quarter, when he took a 15-yard jet sweep for the Rams’ final first down. Playing through pain on one Sunday and being cleared for the next are different standards, and the MRI is the test that sorts them.
What I think
The Rams built their offseason around Nacua, and for nine weeks he has been the offense. The problem with building around one receiver is that the structure has no second load-bearing wall. Adams is on injured reserve, Ferguson cannot stay on the field, and the rest of the room is role players. When the one player holding up the design gets hurt, the design is the injury.
A knee MRI on a 25-year-old who has already sprained his PCL is not routine. The Rams know that. They also know their season is nine games old and they just reached .500 for the first time, with San Francisco ahead in the division and the wild-card field crowded. Every week Nacua misses is a week the offense has to become something it was not built to be.
The trade deadline sits one day after the scan, and the timing is almost too neat. If the MRI is clean, the Rams stand pat. If it is not, they are shopping for a pass catcher on deadline day with no bargaining position and every other team aware of it. The MRI does not just tell Los Angeles about a knee. It tells them what kind of team they are for the next two months.