Editor’s note: On Tuesday afternoon, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported Jayson Tatum underwent surgery to repair a torn right Achilles tendon. There is no current timetable for his return.
NBA championships are painfully elusive. The only thing harder than winning one is defending it the following year, with higher expectations, countless obstacles, a desperate need for some good luck, and the sword of Damocles dangling overhead. On Monday night, it impaled the Boston Celtics.
With just over three minutes left in a dramatic back-and-forth Game 4 that was dominated by two masterful, highly efficient superstar performances from Jalen Brunson (39 points, 12 assists) and Jayson Tatum (42 points, eight rebounds, four steals), the rest of this series—and beyond, for both teams—irrevocably changed.
Down seven, coming out of a timeout, Tatum dove for a loose ball just behind the 3-point line and then immediately grabbed his lower leg. His reaction to the pain was immediate and visceral; he was not able to put any weight on the noncontact injury as a couple of members of Boston’s medical team propped him up for a slow walk back to the visitors’ locker room. “It’s tough to watch a guy like him get carried off like that,” Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla said.
The basketball game had already tilted in New York’s direction before Tatum’s injury, aided by a near-perfect third quarter from Brunson and some timely shotmaking by Mikal Bridges and OG Anunoby. By ultimately winning the game, the Knicks took a commanding 3-1 series lead, and they have an opportunity to make the Eastern Conference finals with a win at TD Garden on Wednesday night. Tatum’s status for that game is in serious doubt, though; an MRI is scheduled for Tuesday morning, and the potential for an extended—i.e., yearlong—absence is on the horizon.
“I think everybody is concerned with Jayson. I’m not sure how bad it is. It didn’t look great,” Celtics forward Jaylen Brown said. “But I think everybody is more concerned with that. Obviously, the loss is huge. But we’ve gotta get ready for Game 5. So we’ll take the night, pick our heads up tomorrow, and put together a game plan to come out on our home floor and keep this series alive.”
Pending Tatum’s test results, this is as somber as it gets for an NBA organization—the exact opposite of where the Celtics have been, celebrating a league-best 18th championship last June and then, this season, bringing everyone back for a run at no. 19. Losing a perennial first-team All-NBA franchise player in his prime is traumatic. Losing him in the middle of the playoffs, when the aging Celtics were meticulously constructed to win everything right now, is an existential crisis.
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It was also the harshest possible reminder of how fragile any attempt to sustain success can be in the NBA. Boston now has to somehow lock in and focus on what may be the last game of its season against the ultraphysical, poised, and durable Knicks, who, in Game 4, grabbed a whopping 38.1 percent of their own missed shots and repeatedly knocked the Celtics out of their actions and off their spots throughout the second half.
“It’s not like we planned to be in this position,” Celtics guard Derrick White said. “But we are where we are, and we’ve got to find a way to win Game 5.”
And it’s likely that they’ll have to persevere without their leader, whose body may have finally broken down. Over the past eight seasons, the Celtics have enjoyed the luxury of relying on a star who hardly ever gets hurt and didn’t miss his first playoff game until Game 2 of this year’s first round. Since he was drafted in 2017, no other player has been within shouting distance of the 24,870 total minutes Tatum has played. In the history of the NBA, only Larry Bird and Horace Grant logged more playoff minutes in the first eight years of their career.
Tatum’s production, two-way impact, and unwavering reliability have been the bedrock of everything the Celtics have accomplished over that period. It showed in Mazzulla’s Game 4 rotation, with Tatum subbing out for the first time in the game with 10:02 left in the second quarter. (Mazzulla has stretched Tatum’s opening stint beyond the first quarter a couple of times this season: a March 8 win over the Los Angeles Lakers in which he dropped 40 in 45 minutes and a blowout victory against the Indiana Pacers on December 27.)
The nightmare that eventually unfolded this time may become a before-and-after moment, though. The aftermath of Tatum’s severe anguish—if he has indeed suffered a ruptured Achilles tendon (an absolute worst-case scenario that was openly feared in various conversations throughout the bowels of Madison Square Garden)—dramatically changes Boston’s short- and long-term trajectory, forcing the team to navigate unfamiliar turbulence and effectively ending a four-year span that yielded one title, two Finals appearances, and an 8-2 record in Eastern Conference playoff series.
But even before they ran up against Brunson’s Knicks, the Celtics were already staring down a financial crunch that would almost definitely chip talented pieces off next season’s team. It makes no sense to pay an unprecedentedly high luxury tax bill for a team that Tatum isn’t healthy enough to play on, let alone a roster that couldn’t slow down New York’s offense in what was virtually a must-win game. “Tonight, defensively, it was terrible defensively tonight, to be frank. No resistance,” Brown said. “Offense was great, offense was fine. No resistance on defense.”
The Knicks generated a boiling 148.9 points per 100 possessions in the second half of Game 4, with Brunson’s 67.7 true shooting percentage and 39.1 usage rate leading the way. Tatum’s own absurd shotmaking helped keep Boston in the game, but his injury had nothing to do with New York going unconscious down the stretch. “We went to a couple of different coverages. I think it was the rebounding and the transition that got us. Obviously, Brunson’s a great player. Anunoby and Bridges separated it with their scoring, and they beat us on the boards,’’ Mazzulla said. “I think they won the shot margin tonight, and in the third quarter, their switching, their pre-switches, slowed us down a bit.”
The tactical back-and-forth that revealed itself as Game 4 went on is not irrelevant for the Knicks. They defeated the defending champs for a third time in four games after looking hopelessly overmatched in four regular-season matchups, clawing back from another double-digit second-half deficit as Tatum’s isolation jumpers were finally starting to fall.
But for the Celtics, a team that couldn’t figure out the little things when it mattered most, the big picture is now overwhelming. Whenever it loses its next game, Boston will be confronted by a level of uncertainty that’s foreign. Pretty much everything is on the table—no trade, short of moving on from Tatum, should shock people, be it Jrue Holiday, Kristaps Porzingis, or even Brown—when the new owner eventually assumes control of a team in turmoil, poised to pivot from one era to the next.
The most promising parallel is what happened to the Golden State Warriors back in 2019, after Kevin Durant went down in the NBA Finals and left in free agency. Golden State was left for dead and missed the playoffs in 2020 and 2021 before winning a remarkable fourth championship in 2022. Rebuilding around Tatum a couple of years from now, with whatever assets can be retrieved in cost-cutting trades this summer, is possible. But Tatum is not Steph Curry, and Curry didn’t need to recover from a ruptured Achilles before remarkably leading his team to another title.
That’s another story for another day, though. There’s too much that’s unknown right now in a season that’s technically not even over. When asked what the night, as a whole, means for the only franchise he’s ever played for, Brown demurred. “I’m not sure,” he paused. “I’ve got no words right now.”
