The Celtics put basketball to the side.
For a brief period, all they were concerned with was Jayson Tatum as a human.
After rupturing his Achilles tendon in Game 4, Tatum had his surgery in New York and has since stayed in the city.
After their Game 5 win over the Knicks staved off elimination and sent the series back to Madison Square Garden, the Celtics saw Tatum in person — Thursday night at the team hotel — for the first time since the injury.
“We didn’t talk about basketball at all,” Payton Pritchard said Friday morning after Celtics shootaround ahead of Game 6. “It’s bigger than basketball now. It’s just seeing how he is as a person, how he’s dealing with stuff. The basketball side, we’ll handle that. Just wanted to check in as a friend.”
The injury is likely to sideline Tatum for all of next season.
“It was really good seeing him,” Pritchard added. “Seemed like he was in really good spirits. Obviously, he’s probably about to be stir crazy for a while now. When you see one of your brothers, your teammates go through a situation like that, you just want to be there to comfort and [do] anything he needs.”
Tatum was one of the most durable stars in the NBA before the injury, averaging 73.1 games per regular season across his eight years in the league.
“It sucks to see someone go down like that who doesn’t deserve it,” Sam Hauser said Friday morning. “But he wouldn’t want anything more than for us to keep winning. He seems to be in good spirits.”
Though the Celtics did not want to talk about basketball with Tatum, his absence certainly changed how they played.
Tatum is one of the league’s most isolation-heavy players — in the playoffs, 29.6 percent of Celtics possessions resulted in a Tatum isolation, second most of any player behind only James Harden entering Friday’s Game 6.
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Without him, the Celtics played faster in Game 5.
It’s a blueprint they’ll likely have to follow next year, as well.
“Jayson is an unbelievable player,” Pritchard said. “He’s a great player that can attack isolations and matchups. When you have a stud like that, you take advantage of that. We don’t have that no more, so now we have to transition into more pace, more off-ball [movement], stuff like that.”
