Jayson Tatum played his second game of the season Sunday after setting the all-time record for fastest recovery from a torn Achilles tendon. Tatum made his debut Friday at home against the Dallas Mavericks, 298 days after his last appearance, and was a little shaken but fine. In Sunday’s game against the playoff-bound Cleveland Cavaliers, Tatum looked more confident and faced a much tougher opponent. In both cases, he was a happy man, smiling and high-fiving as he accepted congratulations from teammates, opponents, fans and anyone who crossed his path. Tatum was clearly delighted after Sunday’s win, saying, “I can’t stress this enough. To go out here and play as a team with the guys, compete, make plays, make mistakes, I’m just happy to be here.”
Whatever Tatum imagined about his recovery in the harrowing aftermath of the injury, he certainly did not expect to join a Celtics team actively competing for the top seed in the Eastern Conference. And not just because Boston will miss out on his services. The Celtics dismantled their roster last summer, producing three of the top five players in minutes played and four of the top nine players in total minutes, including the loss of Tatum. Anyone would have reasonably expected this season to be devoted to entirely forgivable tank action. Instead, Joe Mazzulla has pulled off a perfectly respectable rotation, Jaylen Brown has emerged as the frontrunner for MVP, and the Celtics are just a few games behind the underachieving Detroit Pistons in a less-than-impressive conference. Tatum is not returning for the leisurely homestretch of a year-long retooling project. He is taking on a starting role in the early crescendo of the title hunt.
Once the excitement of playing basketball in a Celtics uniform wears off a bit, Tatum will certainly feel it. Meanwhile, his return was all juicy and generated a ton of good feelings for everyone involved. As long as he stays upright, Tatum is doing more than bolstering Boston’s depth. He’s rewriting what it means for an NBA player in his prime to suffer what has long been considered one of the worst basketball injuries.
Kevin Durant was convinced his career was over when he ruptured his Achilles tendon on June 2, 2019. Doctors and specialists were conducting tests in Toronto’s away locker room, ashen-faced and silent, and Durant didn’t need them to tell him he had torn a tendon. He thought: At that time, the vivid image of Kobe Bryant in everyone’s mind was in serious decline. He was – as fans would prefer to remember – one of the NBA’s worst players over the final 107 games of his career after a lengthy recovery from a ruptured Achilles tendon. An Achilles tendon injury was considered a doomsday event for a basketball player.
Durant told ESPN’s Baxter Holmes in 2024: “That’s all I heard. on.”
The Achilles tendon is a ligament that has the same characteristics as other ligaments. The recovery process is not magic. You have to go in surgically and knit it back together and let it heal, and then carefully strengthen it until it can function more or less like a normal tendon. Bryant, whom Jayson Tatum idolized and modeled his game closely on, ruptured his Achilles tendon in April 2013, and was practicing with his teammates in November of that year after having platelet-rich plasma administered to the reconstructed ligament. By his own estimation, all that remained was cardiovascular control. Bryant, just seven months removed from surgery, insisted, “If there was a playoff game tonight, I would play.” “I don’t know how effective it is, but I’ll play it.”
There’s a problem. Bryant returned to the court for a regular season basketball game before Christmas, but suffered a fractured tibia six games later after then-Lakers coach Mike D’Antoni gave Bryant’s starter four minutes over five days in the second week of play. The Achilles tendon rupture is cited as Bryant’s downfall, and it looms like a monster in the basketball player’s imagination. Right or wrong, when I watch Tatum play basketball on his newly rebuilt tendon, I’ll think about how my basketball idol recovered from an Achilles tendon injury in just eight months and was never the same.
In any case, Durant has long proven that a basketball player can still bully everyone after that horrible pop if his body is given the time it needs to recover. Durant has not competed seriously for 552 days, excluding the entire 2019-20 season. Still, Durant told Holmes he’s not sure he’ll be his old self again by the end of the second round of the 2021 playoffs. More than two years passed before he felt fully recovered. Durant played in 75 games in the 2022-23 season and missed just three games for the Rockets this year in his age-37 season.
Durant has always been an oddball, so it’s hard to know whether other NBA players will be able to achieve the same level of success after a blowout. He and Tatum have one thing in common: they both had surgery right away, and they have one thing in common: people use words like “assault” to describe their approach to the grim task of post-surgical rehabilitation. There their approach is different. Durant decided early on to sit out a year. From the beginning, Tatum seemed to have done his best to return as quickly as possible. Other players are taking Durant’s path. Tyrese Haliburton seemed resigned to being on the shelf for at least the entire season from the beginning, even before he got shingles. Damian Lillard, who ruptured his Achilles tendon about two weeks before Tatum’s injury, has made no noise about returning this season, even though his plucky Trail Blazers are holding on to a spot in the Western Conference play-in and he was healthy enough to participate in the NBA’s 3-point shooting contest in February.
As a true Celtics hater, I’m very happy for Tatum. I’m also cautiously optimistic that advances in treatment and recovery have truly improved the basketball prospects of those suffering from this particular injury. It’s wonderful to think about a future where Achilles tendon ruptures are not the disaster it has long been thought to be. On the other hand, I would think about how there is the quickest recovery and then the best recovery, and how history may lead to those two paths taking different and perhaps even opposing paths. What happens next for Tatum will seem like proof of something, one way or another.
