Everyone has spent the last week destroying the Boston Celtics for the return in the Jaylen Brown trade — and rightfully so! Paul George’s toxic contract, two first-round picks and two seconds for a 29-year-old Finals MVP coming off a career year is the kind of haul that gets people fired. But the return isn’t even the scariest part of this deal.
The scariest part is the right Achilles tendon of the superstar they kept.
When Brad Stevens shipped Brown to Philadelphia, he put every egg the franchise owns into the Jayson Tatum basket. And from a pure injury-analysis standpoint, that’s insane, because NBA history has been screaming the same warning for 50 years: stars do not come back from Achilles tears as the players they were.
The history is brutal
Besides Tatum (27 years old at the time of injury) there have been 16 All-Star players who have torn their Achilles: Elgin Baylor (36), Nate Archibald (29), Dominique Wilkins (32), Isiah Thomas (32), Patrick Ewing (36), Elton Brand (28), Mehmet Okur (30), Chauncey Billups (35), Kobe Bryant (34), DeMarcus Cousins (27), Kevin Durant (30), John Wall (28), Klay Thompson (30), Dejounte Murray (28), Damian Lillard (34) and Tyrese Haliburton (25).
Let’s run through what their respective careers looked like before and after the injury (Lillard and Haliburton return this season, so we don’t know about them yet):
The Bad
- Thomas retired on the spot.
- Baylor, Okur, Billups and Wall each played fewer than 75 games the rest of their respective careers.
- Ewing turned into a shell of himself and played three forgettable seasons before retiring.
- Bryant, Brand and Cousins went from All-NBA-caliber players to below-average players overnight.
The Okay
- Thompson and Murray went from star players to role players.
- Tiny Archibald remained a very good player post-injury, but comparing his six seasons before the injury (26.7 PPG and 8.6 APG) and his six seasons following the injury (12 PPG and 6.7 APG) shows how much he had to change his game.
The Good
- Wilkins, one of the NBA’s best athletes ever, didn’t miss a beat and maintained his high scoring average for the next two seasons before his age caught up with him;
- Durant, arguably the most unstoppable scorer ever, remained an MVP-caliber player, but has missed 130 of a possible 482 regular seasons games post-injury.
The most likely outcome
Let’s assess: Nine bad outcomes; three mediocre outcomes; and two good outcomes — with caveats.
From a statistical standpoint, history tells us there is about an 85 percent chance that Tatum never regains his previous First Team All-NBA form. And even if he does, there’s a good chance that it comes with a qualifier, like availability issues.
Obviously sports science has improved and Tatum is younger than most of the guys on this list, but expecting him to pull a Durant and return to MVP-level form — which is exactly what the Celtics are doing — is crazy for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, Jayson Tatum is not as gifted or freakishly athletic as Kevin Durant.
Second, as quick and impact Tatum’s return was last year, the Celtics are lying to themselves if they think he replicated his prior form. Tatum shot 41.1 percent from the field and 32.9 percent from three in his 16 regular-season games, even admitting afterward he was playing at “80, 85 percent of myself.”
In the playoffs, after four good games against the 76ers staked Boston to a 3-1 lead, his suffered a left leg injury in Game 6 from overcompensating and was held out of a winner-take-all Game 7 at home. 22 games into his comeback, Tatum’s body failed him.
And now Brown is gone. Brown wasn’t just a co-star; he was the insurance policy. He was the superstar the team could rely upon all season long — averaging 28.7 PPG, finishing sixth in MVP voting and dragging a retooled roster to 56 wins and the No. 2 seed — while Tatum rehabbed. What happens to the Celtics now if Tatum isn’t the ironman he was pre-injury?
Forget the terrible return. The fatal flaw of this trade is the assumption baked into it: that Tatum will automatically be the 70-games-a-year, first-team All-NBA machine he was before May 12, 2025. If he is, Boston survives. If he’s what history says he’ll be, the Celtics just traded away their title window for the rest of the decade — and got Paul George’s player option as a receipt.
Makes you kind of wonder: why was Brown — not Tatum — the superstar the Celtics chose to trade?
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