The American, who will turn 24 later this month, injured her knee in last Saturday’s narrow loss in Adelaide.

Laney played only seven minutes before she slipped in the key and felt pain in her knee and groin and will definitely miss this Friday night’s return clash against the Lightning.

Speaking on Tuesday, Spirit coach Simon Pritchard said he was waiting on a report from the team’s physiotherapist, but was confident his shooting guard had evaded serious injury

“She had her scans on Monday, but it just seems to be a sprain of the knee; she doesn’t seem to have had a recurrence of her ACL injury,” he said.

“We are waiting for a prognosis from our physio in terms of how he treats that and how far away she is from getting back to playing.

“It’s just the one game she’ll miss at this point, but I imagine it might be more.”

Laney has been a solid performer for the Spirit through their 1-4 start to the season.

She has averaged 13.8 points per game, four boards and 3.6 assists and 1.4 steals.

This is her second stint in the WNBL after she spent one season with Perth Lynx in 2015-16.

Pritchard said Ashleigh Karaitiana would step into a starting role in Laney’s absence.

“She has been playing well, but I think she can give us more scoring than she has,” he said.

“Currently we are the highest scoring team in the league (420 points), but scoring is not our issue.

“We really need to tighten up our defence and where we make our turnovers.

“We are working on it, we are doing a lot of video analysis on it at training and we’ll continue to do it until we get teams back down to scores we think we can defend.”

In a WNBL season tracking towards being the most even in the league’s history, Pritchard saw his team’s overtime loss to Adelaide Lightning as evidence his side was not far away from reversing its fortunes.

He reserved special praise for long-time centre Gabe Richards, who posed no-end of problems for the Lightning and finished with 22 points and eight rebounds.

“That was Gabe’s best game for quite a while; she was quite angry when Betnijah went down and she was really fired-up,” he said.

“She played with area grit and hardness that only a veteran could do. We need that from her again.”

The Lightning are not without some injury concerns of their own, with centre Ruth Hamblin battling a back injury ahead of games against the Canberra Capitals on Wednesday night and Bendigo on Friday.