BOSTON — This wasn’t how things were supposed to go.
Ten months ago, as Jayson Tatum spun in a circle of despair on the Madison Square Garden floor, it seemed like the end was near. The Celtics were about to lose their best player in the midst of the best game of his career.
A torn Achilles looked like a death sentence for this iteration of the franchise. The second apron and the passage of time were all conspiring to put an end to the Celtics’ attempt at a dynasty.
When the shock wore off, Tatum was sitting on a training table in the back halls of MSG. He began to experience a range of emotions, pondering just how much had slipped through his grasp.
“I wasn’t sure what the future was going to hold,” Tatum recalled Friday night after the Celtics beat the Dallas Mavericks 120-100 in his return from the Achilles tear. “The start of last playoffs, we felt like we had a three-, four-, five-year run with that team, trying to (win as) many championships as we could. And it all changed in that moment with that team.”
He never expected to get hurt like that. Throughout last season, he proudly resisted pleas to load manage, insisting he wanted to show up every night for the proverbial fans in the Western Conference who only get to see him once a year. Suddenly, he was reevaluating everything. He had an idea of how his career would go, but then it all changed.
Tatum knew the fire sale was around the corner. Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porziņģis would certainly depart. Al Horford and Luke Kornet were likely headed elsewhere. There was speculation that Jaylen Brown could be shipped out so the team could blow the whole thing up and start over. Forget about the length of the window; the window may have shut for good.
“So it was a lot of uncertainty for me,” Tatum said. “I didn’t know what was next, and there was a lot of doubt that crept in my mind at that time.”
Then something miraculous happened. Everything changed, yet nothing changed at all.
The Celtics have somehow left that old team behind and picked up with a new one. They are once again in second place in the Eastern Conference this season. Tatum is back on the floor, even if he can barely jump off of it. The Celtics are still contenders, regardless of what happened last spring and summer.
They have defied the laws of physics in the NBA universe. The second apron was brought into existence to prevent this from happening. Teams that spent big money to build champions were forced to retreat, which is exactly what the Celtics did. They bid farewell to the aforementioned vets. They rolled out half of their rotation from the prior year and filled the gaps with deep reserves who have barely held down minutes in their careers, somehow remaining one of the best teams in the league.
It’s bittersweet when your team lives on without you. It’s a rare scenario where one of the best players in the world can wonder if they still belong.
Klay Thompson gets it. He’s been there. When the Mavs wings stood across from Tatum Friday evening, he recognized an anxious stage of an all-too-familiar journey.
Thompson was an instrumental piece of one of the greatest dynasties of the modern NBA. Then, in the middle of his prime, he tore his ACL in Game 6 of the 2019 Finals before tearing his right Achilles in November 2020, just as he was approaching a return to play. It took him two years of painstaking rehab to return, only to win one last title with the Warriors over Tatum and the Celtics in 2022. As tough as the physical work was to come back, the isolation of watching his team continue on without him was just as crushing.
“I know what that’s like. It’s not fun watching your teammates compete without you, especially a caliber player like Jayson, one of the best players in the world,” Thompson told The Athletic. “You know what you’re capable of, you know how much you can help. So that’s the worst feeling, feeling like a prisoner in your own body. And for him to do what he did tonight, I was very happy for him.”
Thompson learned that recovery takes patience and understanding. It’s hard to understand just how much patience. When Tatum was first able to walk in a boot, he headed straight for the court. He had to get shots up. That’s what he’s been doing just about every day of his life.
He was dismayed when he was told no, that he couldn’t even do form shooting. Even stationary. Just the suggestion of his heel lifting off the ground was off limits. The calf shrivels after the injury, so rehab starts with the simplest maneuvers before even getting back on the court.
“It’s really tedious. The atrophy after surgery is serious,” Thompson said. “You lose a lot of strength in your calf muscle. So there’s just like three, four months of just pure calf raises and really tedious work with your toes, grabbing towels and marbles.”
Throughout Tatum’s rehab, every rep had to be counted. His trainer, Nick Sang, would monitor his shooting drills to count how many times he raised his calf, making sure Tatum didn’t exceed quota. Their partnership was vital to Tatum’s expedient process.
Sang and Tatum joined the Celtics at the same time in 2017, with Sang being promoted from intern to physical therapist at the start of Tatum’s rookie season. They became close friends, to the point that Sang returned to the Celtics to work exclusively with Tatum after the New England Patriots poached him away in November 2020. That bond proved crucial when Tatum had to start from scratch.
Over this past year, Sang spent countless hours researching Achilles rehab and calling specialists to consult. There was a meticulous science to how he trained, trying to optimize efficiency while mitigating risk.
“(Sang) had the biggest role. For the last 10 months, I haven’t (gone) 48 hours without seeing Nick,” Tatum said. “He was there when I was injured and he was with me every step of the way. … (he would) hold me accountable every single day, push me when I didn’t necessarily want to be there or when I doubted myself. So I can never say thank you enough to him.”
Tatum has always had a strong support system, but it has grown now that he is part of an unfortunate fraternity. When the final buzzer sounded, Tatum walked through a sea of people to find Thompson at half court. They hugged it out and spoke for a few seconds, connecting about life on the other side of the return.
“I just told him how happy I was for him and if I were to do it again, I would have given myself more grace, especially the first year I came back,” Thompson said. “You have rough nights from the field shooting, and you want to go in a dark place and think you’re not the same player. But that’s not the case. With modern medicine and advancements and training, you can definitely get back to All-NBA level, and he will do that.”
That could come, but it’s a long way away. Tatum looked rusty in the first half of his season debut. When the seas parted for him to throw down a wide-open dunk, his lift was so low that the only defender the Mavs needed was the rim. He wasn’t defying the actual laws of physics this early in his return.
He threw up an airball on his signature pull-up 3. He went up to protect the rim and barely could get an arm up to contest. Tatum played in the first half like he was tethered to the earth, his rehabbed calf muscles loudly asking for him to hold his horses on the whole “I’m back” thing.
But even just a halftime regroup was enough to get him back to a semblance of rhythm. Tatum looked like a tempered, yet present version of himself. Enough to be more than just a decent placeholder, more than a complicated reintegration.
When Thompson came back from his injuries, he returned midseason and played an important role on a championship run. He wasn’t quite his old self, but he was still himself.
And despite all the deflated leaps and sluggish cuts from Tatum, he was a semblance of himself. The tenor of his game is all there. The power of it will come in time. Maybe a long time. Now he’s back, and so are Boston’s championship hopes. Tatum said he never cheated the game, but somehow he and the Celtics have cheated franchise death in an NBA landscape that stacked the deck against them. His Achilles tear was supposed to break the Celtics. His return showed that it has only strengthened them.
Everything they want is, somehow, still within reach, just as they hoped a year ago. It’s only how they get there that has changed.
“What I realized is that we know many great athletes that have went through ups and downs in their career, but it’s another thing to live it,” Tatum said. “The things I want to accomplish are still in front of me, but how you get there looks different for everybody.”
