Celtics star Jayson Tatum nearly posts triple-double in a remarkable return from Achilles injury

Less than 300 days after tearing his right Achilles tendon in last year’s playoffs, Jayson Tatum returned to the court for the Boston Celtics on Friday. It went better than anyone could’ve possibly hoped. In 27 minutes, Tatum nearly put up a triple-double with 15 points, 12 rebounds and seven assists as a plus-20 in a 120-100 win over the Mavericks.

Remarkable. There is no way even the most optimistic Tatum fan saw this kind of performance coming. The TD Garden crowd went wild when Tatum recorded his first bucket on a put-back dunk late in the first half. He followed that up with an escape-dribble corner 3 on the ensuing possession.

With that sequence, Tatum was officially back.

“It was surreal,” Tatum said of his first game back. “It was an emotional day. It’s been a long journey. Many days I dreamed about this. And for it to finally happen, to share it with my family, my teammates, the crowd, it was everything I could’ve dreamed of.

“I still got a long way to go. But this is a huge step.”

You can say that again. If you were questioning what version of Tatum the Celtics were going to get, you have your answer. His legs might not be quite there yet, and the rhythm will come and go for a while, but with more than a month remaining in the regular season, this is a guy who can be pretty damn close to full-go by the time the playoffs arrive, and certainly by the later rounds.

Even before he hit his scoring stride, when he air-balled his first 3 and front-rimmed a dunk and looked a little bit hesitant to move with force, especially vertically, Tatum was a clearly injecting juice into the Celtics. He was playing at his pace, in control, making quick, in-rhythm reads like this cut and feed to Sam Hauser for a corner 3.

Tatum admitted he was anxious, saying he felt he was a “step off” or “moving too fast” early on, and this is to be expected. You can’t replicate the speed of an NBA game in practice, certainly not with the adrenaline that Tatum was feeling on Friday. But he said the game slowed down once he “relaxed a little bit” and that’s when he really started to flow. For me, the touch on this lob pass to Neemias Queta might’be been the smoothest thing Tatum did all night.

This is a pass of repetition, usually. To loft the ball so precisely, so softly, on the move … that is not something that is easy to do after 10 months away from live NBA action. But Tatum comes off the dribble handoff with a second-nature feel for the way the play is going to unfold. Like riding a bike.

This action is going to unlock another dimension of Boston’s offense. It can be either Tatum or Jaylen Brown at the point, but either way you now have two superstar scorers (one with the ball and one off ball waiting to attack against a defense in rotation) with shooters spaced around the arc and a rolling big man.

You can’t cover it all. Sink down off the corner shooters to thwart the lob, a sniper is left open. Stay with the ball handler, he hits the roller with a lob as you saw in the play above. Stay attached to the shooters and the roller, and the superstar scorer has a clear path to the rim. Exhibit A:

Here he plays pick-and-roll with Queta again, and this time Dwight Powell does a pretty good job of toggling between Tatum and the roller as the wings stay attached to shooters and Cooper Flagg trails Tatum from behind. This is about as good as you can do against a well-spaced floor with a superstar probing downhill (well, other than PJ Washington completely losing track of Brown at the end), and it’s still not good enough as Tatum just patiently sits down in the soft midrange area and cashes a little fallaway.

This the star factor that has just doubled for the Celtics. A defense can do everything right, and still there are two guys on the court who can get any shot they want. Those two buckets happened over a 50-second span, and less than a minute later, Tatum completed the three-level scoring challenge with a pull-up corner 3 over Washington.

And finally, the nightcap:

“There’s a sense of gratitude and a sense of perspective,” Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla said. “At the end of day you saw a guy at his most vulnerable state, and you’re seeing that journey back. The journey may start today, but there’s no end game to that. It could be a long time. And I think along the way, you have to have a sense of gratitude. You have to have a sense of perspective. And you also have to have a sense of like, it’s time to get back to work.”

Indeed, that’s what this next month and change is about. Getting Tatum back to work, back into the rhythm of the team, the offense, the defense, and most importantly back into a confident and comfortable headspace in which all doubt about his health and ability to put his foot in the ground and fully explode has been erased.

That last part is a major part of coming back from an injury like this. These guys are human. It’s going to take some time before Tatum can fully trust his body. I assure you, that feeling of his Achilles popping is still in his head. But with each movement, each successful stint, quarter, game, the confidence will grow. As Tatum said, he’s got a ways to go. But this was indeed one hell of a start.