With just 15 games left in the NBA regular season, Portland Trail Blazers wing Matisse Thybulle spoke with media Friday afternoon at the team’s practice facility in Tualatin. The interview marked Thybulle’s first media availability since Trail Blazers Media Day, all the way back in September.
“Being a basketball player again is great,” Thybulle said. “It’s been tough to be a basketball player that can’t play basketball.”
It has been a season of frustration, rehabilitation and patience for the 28-year-old defensive specialist. Prior to the start of the season in mid-October, Thybulle underwent a procedure to clean up inflammation in his right knee that was expected to keep him out 3-4 weeks. Then just days before he was ready to return from that injury, Thybulle suffered a grade 2 sprain in late November that has taken away the majority of his season. On Wednesday against the New York Knicks, Thybulle reached a long-awaited milestone: Though he didn’t come off the bench to make his season debut, Thybulle was available to play in a game for the first time this season.
After practice Friday, the seven-year NBA vet discussed his journey back to the lineup, while also shedding more light on that nasty ankle sprain. Thybulle said it was a grade 2/3 sprain, leaning more toward 3. It happened during a game of 2-on-2 at the practice facility when he rolled over his ankle on a misstep and “heard a nice little pop.”
“The overarching sentiment is that with ankle sprains this bad, it’s sometimes better just to break it than to sprain it,” Thybulle said. “Because the recovery time with all the ligaments that were torn takes so long.”
The severe ankle sprain on top of the knee issue was a difficult one-two punch for Thybulle to deal with, and it caused him to miss the most time due to injury in his seven NBA seasons. The recovery process took so long it required a shift in perspective to get through it.
“At first, it’s really frustrating — I’m angsty and upset and trying to find ways to get back out there,” he said. “Once realizing the severity of the injury, I had to accept it’s going to take time and then the relationship became just that of doing my rehab and showing up every day and being excited about the little steps ... It’s been a bit of a journey, and not one that I’ve known before.”
Moving down the home stretch of the season, Portland head coach Chauncey Billups said the team can benefit from Thybulle’s fresh legs, as well as his mind and soul when he puts him on the court. However, he didn’t have a solid answer for where Thybulle will fit into the rotation the rest of the way, noting his deployment will likely be hit or miss.
“When you’re dealing with a guy that’s missed 67 games and didn’t even play in a preseason game, it’s tough to just inject him into the rotation with all these guys who have been around developing some things,” Billups said. “So we’ll see. I trust ‘Tisse, and I trust that whenever I put him in there he’s gonna play the right way.”
Thybulle agreed that it’s difficult to jump back in at this late stage, and there’s an unknown element to it. He’s just ready to fit in where he can and lean on his complementary playing style as he feels his way back over the final month of the season.
“Coming into a season this late is kinda crazy,” he said. “I’m not wanting to take away from what’s happening because I feel like we’ve found ourselves to a certain degree, and I’m not wanting to add to it and junk things up. But I think the nature of who I am as a player fits in in most situations pretty well, so I’m just trying to trust that and just see what Coach wants and see how I can complement the guys.”