Through Sunday's loss to the Timberwolves, Jayson Tatum is averaging 9.7 drives per game this season, down slightly from his 2024-25 numbers.
Through Sunday's loss to the Timberwolves, Jayson Tatum is averaging 9.7 drives per game this season, down slightly from his 2024-25 numbers.Matthew J. Lee/Globe Staff
Once the emotion of a 298-day recovery from a ruptured Achilles tendon was behind him, Jayson Tatum could speak with clear eyes about the journey to get back on the court and the steps still ahead of him.
“I don’t think any athlete thinks that they’re ever going to get hurt — at least I didn’t,” Tatum said on March 6, after his first game back.
“It never crossed my mind. I felt like I did everything right, took care of my body and I didn’t cheat the game. So when it happened, it literally knocked me on my [butt]. It made me rethink a lot of things. I had an idea of how my career was going to go and one night it changed.”
As much as Tatum never considered the possibility of an injury so severe, he also implicitly never doubted that he would return from it.
That’s as much a testament to his resolve as it is to the evolution of Achilles recovery the past 25 years.
An Achilles injury was once an NBA death sentence. When Isiah Thomas ruptured his Achilles in 1994 at age 33, it ended his Hall of Fame career. The story of Dominique Wilkins tearing his Achilles in 1992, returning the next season, and averaging nearly 30 points became the miraculous outlier.
According to a 2020 study in the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine, 72.3 percent of players who suffer an Achilles injury return to action. From Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson and Wesley Matthews to Dwight Powell and Rudy Gay, players have not only returned, but built long careers after Achilles injuries the past decade. Meanwhile, John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins are reminders they can still cut promising careers short.
All recoveries look different, and reaching the same level of play isn’t guaranteed, but the stage Tatum is in can be telling. The first 40 to 50 games after returning from an Achilles rupture often offer the clearest glimpse of a player’s post-injury trajectory.
Julian Benbow
Of a select recent sample of players who suffered Achilles injuries since 2012, no one recovered faster than Matthews. He was 28 years old when it happened in March 2015, in a contract season for a Trail Blazers team with title hopes.
It took him just 237 days to return to the court, in time for opening night of the next season with the Mavericks, who signed him to a four-year, $70 million contract without much reservation.
“It wasn’t based on one year. I wanted a guy we could keep around for four years and a guy who was a locker room guy,” Cuban told the Dallas Morning News in 2015. “A guy who could shoot the ball and really works defensively and isn’t all about athleticism so he can play as he gets older. If we could have traded for him a year after he was hurt, normally we’d do something like that.”
Seven games into his return, Matthews played 33 minutes and scored 25 points on 9-of-13 shooting. In Game 19, he played 41 minutes and put up 36. And 33 games into his return, he played 43 minutes and scored 20 points in a double-overtime win.
In his first game post-injury, Durant played 25 minutes and scored 22 points on 7-of-16 shooting with 5 rebounds and 3 assists. He played more than 30 minutes and scored 29 points in each of his next two, including on Christmas 2020 against the Celtics. Durant ran into a setback nearly two months into his comeback when a hamstring injury forced him to miss 23 games, but he returned before the playoffs and led the Nets to the conference semifinals.
Those are best-case scenarios.
DeMarcus Cousins famously ruptured his Achilles at the worst imaginable time. He was 27 years old, at the peak of his powers in New Orleans, with a possible $200 million max contract on the horizon when the injury struck in 2018.
“The first two things that popped up in my head was, one, I’m not going to get a chance to play in the playoffs,” he told the Run Your Race podcast last June. “The second thing was I just missed out on my money. That was my contract year. That was my big bag.”
The recovery took a full year. He signed a one-year deal with the Warriors, but never rediscovered the form that made him one of the most dynamic offensive centers in basketball. He scored 14 points in 15 minutes in his return game in January 2019, but only reached the 30-minute mark in five of the 38 games he played that season. Ultimately a quadriceps injury and, eventually, an ACL injury capped his career; he played just 139 games his final three seasons.
Cousins is in a group of players since 2012 — along with Wall, Rodney Hood, Brandon Jennings, Chauncey Billups, Kobe Bryant, and David Nwaba — who didn’t play more than 160 games post-injury. Billups (35) and Bryant (34) were both older and in the later stages of their careers. Jennings and Wall were explosive guards who built their games on shiftiness and acceleration. Hood and Nwaba were wings with different styles. Cousins was a mobile and agile big man.
On the other end, Durant and Matthews are in a group with Thompson, Powell, and Gay that set the precedent for building long careers after Achilles injuries. None were older than 30 when the injury occurred and, with the exception of Powell, all were wings who had perimeter shooting at the foundation of their games.
Tatum’s play style fits squarely into that group.
“We know many great athletes that have went through ups and downs in their career,” Tatum said. “But it’s another thing to live it.”
In eight games since his return, he’s averaging 30 minutes. His drives are down slightly to 9.7 per game and, for the first time in his career, more than half his shot attempts are 3-pointers — two signals that he’s still getting acclimated.
Tatum’s return came with 19 games left in the regular season, capping his window this year at 47 games (given four potential seven-game series in the playoffs). As crucial as that window may be for the Celtics’ hopes of sneaking into the championship picture, it’s also vital for Tatum’s long-term outlook.
For the Celtics, this is a runway to the playoffs. For Tatum, it’s the foundation for his post-injury career.
“The things I want to accomplish are still in front of me,” Tatum said. “But how you get there is different for everybody. It’s been tough. Obviously, I can talk about it all day, but I’m really just kind of happy that I got to this point.”
Julian Benbow can be reached at julian.benbow@globe.com.