Hayward Injury Could Doom Boston
The Boston Celtics aren’t just going to be in for a rough season after star player Gordon Hayward suffered a badly broken leg in the team’s opening-night loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Hayward dislocated his ankle and fractured his tibia in particularly gruesome fashion early in the first quarter of the Oct. 17 NBA opener after attempting to complete an alley-oop dunk. He will undoubtedly be out for the season and will doubtlessly face a long road of recovery from extensive surgery followed by intensive rehab, after which nobody knows how psychologically fit he’ll be when (or if) he takes to the court again.
That the injury – captured on live TV in all the visceral ugliness the scene could afford, with repeated close-ups of Hayward’s leg and anguished face – is season-ending for Hayward is kind of beside the point. Cleveland was only ahead 10-9 and Boston, armed with players like Hayward, recent trade Kyrie Irving and even the promising rookie Jayson Tatum, had plenty of time (and the talent) to win – indeed they almost did, given the 102-99 final score. The fact is there was no need for the usually unselfish Hayward to showboat like he did when the only thing to be gained was a possible one-point lead, so however unfortunate his injury might be, we shouldn’t deviate from the main issue: his team is now looking at a much longer row to hoe.
Just for reference, Boston’s odds to win the 2018 NBA Championship are currently listed at +850 on Bovada, the industry’s leading legal offshore sports betting site, but the bookies there still haven’t recalculated the Celtics chances in the wake of Hayward’s absence. The same goes for Boston’s odds to win the Atlantic Division, now listing for -350, and the Eastern Conference, where the Celtics sit just behind the Cavs with +275 odds to Cleveland’s -175.
Boston head coach Brad Stevens will have to figure out how to make use of his remaining players – of which only four are returning faces from last year – and that probably means relying more heavily on Marcus Smart, Jaylen Brown, Semi Ojeleye and Jayson Tatum. While Smart is able and eager to step up into a starting role, the absence of Hayward may be asking a lot (or at least a lot more) from unproven factors like Brown, Ojeleye and Tatum. However, Stevens could view this situation, however uncomfortable as it no doubt is minus his best player, as a chance to work within somewhat lesser pressure to succeed, especially right away.
With Hayward sidelined for the rest of the season and possibly beyond if his injuries prove to be as severe as they looked on TV Tuesday night, Boston can no longer be realistically expected to win more than 50 games. Most analysts, though they’ve only had since Tuesday night to ponder the ramifications of Hayward’s hurts, certainly do not look for the Celtics to make it very far into the Eastern Conference Finals, if they can make it at all without their best man on the court. However, this scenario – where Boston entrenches and focuses on building up its younger players and establishing itself in some other aspect of the game – is a bet of a stretch, even at this early stage of the season.
However, it’s only a stretch because of the obvious fact that nobody would want to be in Boston’s place right now with the loss of a verifiable superstar like Hayward and not because of any dearth of talent still left on the team. In fact, the Celtics aforementioned young players did very well indeed against the Cavaliers, with Brown showing a lot of calm and grit in equal measure on the way to a 25-point, six-rebound game. Tatum, playing his first ever NBA game did run into some first half trouble against King James himself, but bounced back in the second half with 12 points on a 5-for-7 showing, and he even rejected LeBron down the stretch to raucous applause.
Promising performances from the young guns and supporting cast aside, the real question now is whether or not Irving can step into the role foisted on him by Hayward’s misfortune – that of the face of the Celtics. Irving did a good job in his debut wearing Boston’s green-and-white, not outwardly appearing to go for a “put the team on my back” game, displaying high capabilities as a team player and the de facto leader for the new recruits and even managing 10 assists – a good start at integrating into a new system and ingratiating himself with fans. That said, Irving did have an almost comical airball at the buzzer from the perimeter (right over the head of former team mate James too – ouch) that could have won Boston the game.
Whatever the outcome of Hayward’s surgery and recovery, and whatever the rest of Boston’s season looks like, BestUSASportsbooks.com thinks things will be different from here out. They could be doomed, true, but the Celtics did show a lot of promise anyway. They probably don’t have much hope of making a playoffs run now, but that won’t be the end of the world for a team that needed to – and now must - reinvent itself.