NEW YORK (AFP) - Milwaukee Bucks big man Larry Sanders has been suspended for at least 10 National Basketball Association (NBA) games for violating the league's anti-drug programme, the league said on Friday.

The 26-year-old will remain sidelined until he is in full compliance with his treatment programme, the league said.

Sanders, who was suspended for one game in December for a flagrant foul against Portland's French forward Nicolas Batum, left the team later that month because of personal reasons and has not played since.

In January, he told reporters at a Bucks game, which he attended in street clothes, that he was "trying to get to the root of a lot of issues and get them corrected going forward".

Sanders inked a US$44 million (S$58.4 million) contract extension with the Bucks after a unexpectedly successful 2012-13 season.

But he had a tumultuous 2013-14 campaign when he was limited to 23 games by a thumb injury suffered in an altercation at a nightclub as well as a broken orbital bone, suffered when he took an inadvertent elbow to the eye from Houston's James Harden.

Sanders finally was suspended for five games at the end of last season for violating the NBA's anti-drug policy, later saying the ban was for marijuana use.