Keenan Lewis negotiating settlement in injury grievance with Saints

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Former Saints cornerback Keenan Lewis and his former team are negotiating a settlement over an injury grievance he filed, multiple sources with knowledge of the case told The New Orleans Advocate on Tuesday.

Figures pertaining to the settlement weren’t immediately available because it had not been finalized. But an arbitration hearing pitting Lewis against the NFL and the Saints was scheduled to start Thursday morning in New Orleans in front of league arbitrator Sidney Moreland.

News of the dispute’s settlement surfaced less than a year after the Saints fired Deryk Jones and Misty Suri as team doctors following what was described as the misdiagnosis of a leg injury suffered by cornerback Delvin Breaux.

Breaux missed most of last year’s training camp with what the doctors concluded was a leg contusion, but a second opinion revealed it was a broken fibula, officials have said. For his part, Lewis was released by the Saints before the 2016 after battling a lingering hip injury that has since required multiple operations. Lewis has publicly stated that during a visit before last season, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ discovered that he had undergone a “failed surgery.”

During an appearance on WWL radio in August, Lewis said that one of his hip flexors is deteriorating because of his treatment and that he was hospitalized because of an undetected staph infection in December 2016 resulting from his surgery.

Suri remains the team doctor for the NBA’s Pelicans, who are also owned by Saints owner Gayle Benson. The Saints’ new team doctors are Michael Hartman and Larry “Chip” Bankston.

Lewis, a native of the rough-and-tumble Algiers neighborhood known as the Cut Off, last played in the NFL in 2015. He initially hooked on with the Saints in 2013 after starting his career as a third-round pick of the Steelers in 2009.

His best season in New Orleans was his first one, when he led a fourth-ranked Saints defense with four interceptions and 13 pass break-ups during a campaign that saw the franchise win its first away playoff game.

He earned all-metro honors as a senior while playing for New Orleans’ O. Perry Walker High School in 2003. He played his college ball at Oregon State before helping the Steelers win an AFC title during his second season in Pittsburgh. Attempts to contact Lewis, now 31, were unsuccessful Tuesday.

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