Hal14 wrote:Parliament10 wrote:itrsteve wrote:
It's insane. I have no qualified opinion in any direction, but it seems miraculous and has to have some eastern front offices punching the air. If we're in the play-off mix (which isn't hard with the Play-In tournament) then it's difficult to imagine not seeing him this year.
I remember they said his quick and decisive action to immediately go into surgery vs lingering around with an active injury consulting different surgeons would greatly speed things along. So perhaps this is the net effect?
They said something about doing the surgery within 12 hours. Not letting scar tissue form, and some other body injury reactions.
It was the speedy surgery, that seems to be the primary factor.
Primary factor in what? A heavily edited 20 second video where he does 8 dribbles and 3 shots in an empty gym, we see a 1 second clip of him doing some light running and lifting some weights?
A quick search I did says that the typical timeline for an NBA player returning from a torn achilles indicates that light basketball activities like dribbling and form shooting can happen 4-6 months after the injury.
Tatum tore his achilles May 14 and got surgery right after. So it's been 4 and a half months since then. So it is not surprising at all if Tatum is doing light basketball activities. Seems like he's right on track.
Brad has said there is *no* timeline for Tatum's return.
And there is basically zero precedent for a player to come back late in the season from an injury this severe. Especially a player who's the franchise player, in his prime (only 27 yrs old) on literally the richest contract in NBA history which means the team will be more careful and cautious when bringing a player back from injury than any time in league history that a player has been injured.
The thing is, there's zero precedent for Tatum's exact situation at all...
No NBA athlete wants to rupture their Achilles tendon. But Jayson Tatum is in a much better position than most to fully recover from this traumatic injury.
That’s because the 27-year-old Celtics superstar, who ruptured his Achilles in the fourth quarter of Monday’s Game 4 against the Knicks in New York City, underwent a successful surgery at the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) just hours after the injury occurred. According to multiple sources, the surgery was performed by one of the world’s leading Achilles tendon surgeons, Dr. Martin O’Malley, who also operated on Kevin Durant after he ruptured his Achilles.
...
You might expect all NBA players to have endless resources at their disposal, and therefore be able to get an Achilles rupture repaired on a 12-hour turnaround. But, that’s not typically the case.
For context, Damian Lillard ruptured his Achilles on April 27 and underwent surgery on May 2nd. DeMarcus Cousins tore his on a Saturday night and had the surgery on Wednesday. Wesley Mathews tore his Achilles on a Thursday, and had the surgery six days later. Rudy Gay also had to wait five days.
Even Kevin Durant, who often serves as the poster child for what a successful recovery can look like, tore his Achilles on a Monday night and had the surgery performed on Wednesday.
Though these were all high-profile NBA players, it always takes time to put everything together to make the surgery possible, Soslowsky explained.
“Fifty percent of their time, they’re not in their home city, and the choice of which surgeon you’re going to have perform that operation is a conversation between the athlete, the agent, maybe the team, ownership, maybe colleagues or friends of the athlete,” he said. “And once those conversations happen, those conversations take a little bit of time. They don’t happen within the first half hour, right? They begin then, and then, once you settle on the surgeon, depending on what city that surgeon is in, it’s often not in the city that you’re in. So, there’s some time involved there. And then that surgeon may have a clinic day that day, and they may not have an operating day until the next day or two days later.”
Almost miraculously, Tatum just so happened to already be in New York City, where the Celtics faced the Knicks at Madison Square Garden. And, Dr. O’Malley was available.
That reality, coupled with the fact that Tatum is so young — most NBA players who have suffered this injury have been at least 30 years old — puts him in uncharted territory. It also means that the somewhat discouraging data that currently exists regarding players’ decline upon return from an Achilles rupture might not necessarily be applicable in Tatum’s case.
“There’s not a lot of data on recovery from Achilles tear for a 27-year-old at 12 hours post-tear, right?” said Dr. Soslowsky. “There’s no data, really, out there.”
Surgeons universally recommend operative Achilles tendon repair as soon as possible to restore functionality and reduce the risk of re-rupture. But, regular people have to wait days, if not weeks, to go through all the hoops and hurdles of getting a surgery on the books.
“You’re going to get infiltration of biologic agents and cells that will create the beginnings of scar formation,” Soslowsky said. “Because this repair was within a day, those processes had only just begun, and with a surgical pair, the torn ends were put right back together before a lot of these adverse biologic effects occurred. And so the opportunity for a faster recovery really is present.”
https://www.celticsblog.com/2025/5/15/24430310/jayson-tatum-achilles-tendon-injury-celtics-nba-playoffs-surgery-recovery-timeline
