BOSTON — Jayson Tatum was not in attendance at TD Garden for Game 5 after undergoing surgery to repair a torn Achilles on Tuesday. However, the Celtics All-Star presence was still felt as his teammates kept their season alive with a 127-102 blowout win over the Knicks to trim their series deficit to 3-2.
Multiple Celtics revealed that the forward sent the team a message ahead of the victory.
“I think just expressing, obviously he’s on his path and road to recovery and stuff like that and then just kind of encouraging us to go out and keep doing the job, keep trying to accomplish the goal,” Luke Kornet said.
The positive message clearly reverberated throughout the Celtics locker room, according to his close friend Derrick White.
“We’ve got a lot of people that are highly competitive, and we’ve got a lot of talent in that locker room,” White said. “Seeing our brother go down was tough. He texted us today before the game like he’s cheering us on, so that was cool to hear. Go out there and compete, and we won the game.”
Jaylen Brown acknowledged after the Game 5 win on the TNT broadcast that the win was for Tatum. However, it was evident that the Celtics had plenty of pride in trying to prove to the world that the series wasn’t over with the All-Star sidelined.
“I mean, obviously losing JT’s tough, especially for how much work he puts into the game and works on his body and everything he does to go out and compete every night,” White said. “So seeing him go down was tough, but we’ve got a lot of guys out here that are highly competitive, and we didn’t want our season to end tonight. So just going out there and competing. We said after Game 4 we’ve just got to win Game 5, and now we’ve got to move on and try to win Game 6.”
The series now shifts to Madison Square Garden on Friday night as the Celtics fight to keep their season alive for the second straight game.
“I know it’s easy to kind of write things off,” Jaylen Brown said. “Obviously, unfortunate what happened to JT, but we still got basketball to be played. I believe in his group, so don’t count us out just yet.”