NEW YORK — With their season on the line, the Boston Celtics walked into TD Garden a man down on Wednesday night. Jayson Tatum ruptured his Achilles late in the fourth quarter of Game 4 and had surgery to repair the issue the very next morning. But just because he wasn’t on the court with the Celtics doesn’t mean he didn’t help them in Game 5.
“He sent a message to the staff and players today,” Joe Mazzulla said before the game.
“I think he just expressed that, obviously, he’s on his path toward recovering and then just kind of encouraging us to go out and keep doing the job and keep trying to accomplish the goal,” Luke Kornet said post-game.
And with Tatum sidelined, the Celtics did exactly what he wanted them to do—keep doing the job.
Jaylen Brown assumed the lead ball-handler role, dishing out a career-high 12 assists, and Kornet rained down a monstrous seven-block performance. Throw in the 12 combined threes from Derrick White and Payton Pritchard, and Boston’s Game 5 blowout was complete.
They earned a 127-102 victory, forcing the series back to New York, all on the back of Tatum, Brown, and Al Horford. “JB and Al just kind of spoke and talked to us,” said Kornet. By the end of Monday night, no one could focus on basketball. But Brown and Horford knew the team had to be right by Wednesday night.
And Mazzulla isn’t afraid to let them know that, either.
“Joe kind of throughout the years has been stressing just kind of the message of, you just have to love the situation that you’re in, and you can’t really control that, but you can just control how you respond to it,” said Kornet.
The Celtics head coach mimicked those words in his own post-game press conference, too.
“You don’t pick the tests you have,” he said. “You pick how you respond to them.”
Losing Tatum is about as big of a test as the Celtics could have asked for, especially considering they were already down 3-1. Yet when the ball flew through the air for tip-off on Wednesday, they were more than ready. And they passed with flying colors.
The Celtics visited Jayson Tatum in New York
Boston's Game 5 victory gave them a chance to head back to New York for Game 6, but it allowed them to visit Tatum, who is recovering at the team hotel in NYC.
“It was really good seeing him,” Pritchard said at shootaround on Friday. “I mean, obviously, he's out of surgery. Seemed like he was in really good spirits and stuff. Obviously, he's probably about to be stir crazy for a while now, but it was just good. When you see one of your brothers, your teammates go through a situation like that, you just want to be there to comfort anything he needs.”
But despite the fact that the Celtics have a do-or-die game ahead of them in Game 6, basketball wasn't a topic of conversation during the visit.
“We didn't talk about basketball at all,” Pritchard said. “That stuff is bigger than basketball. It's just seeing how he is as a person, how he's feeling, and stuff, and the basketball side, we'll handle that. But just want to check in as a friend.”
What does Jayson Tatum's recovery timeline look like?
According to Tatum's dad, who spoke with Marc J. Spears, Tatum could be back on the court in eight to nine months. However, UPenn’s Dr. Lou Soslowsky told Noa Dalzell of CelticsBlog that the usual recovery timeline for a ruptured Achilles takes anywhere from seven months to a year and a half:
"Dr. Soslowsky said that the return to injury spans from anywhere between 7 months to a year and a half, and it’s nearly impossible at this point to determine which of those scenarios is most realistic. In a few months, Tatum and the Celtics will be able to assess where he’s at in his recovery and determine whether he’s in a position to make a push to return next season," Dalzell wrote.