Via the Celtics: The Boston Celtics announced today that center Robert Williams underwent a successful arthroscopic procedure to remove loose bodies and address swelling in his left knee. The surgery was performed by Celtics Team Physician Dr. Tony Schena at New England Baptist Hospital. Williams is expected to return to basketball activities in 8-12 weeks.
Karalis’ take:
The 8-12 weeks comes as a bit of surprise considering the initial reporting was about 4-6 weeks. Doubling the injury absence of a key player takes this from “they just need to hold down the fort for a little while” to “uh oh, this is a problem.”
The issue with the timeline isn't necessarily that this is more serious than we originally thought. I still think this procedure was a clean up, but the phrase “address swelling in his left knee” is the key one to me because it’s in addition to cleaning up loose bodies. The phrasing makes it sound like they sucked out some debris, which is normal, and then did something else to address the swelling in the knee.
Hopefully there will be some clarification during Monday’s media day.
The timeline also means a significant number of missed games for Williams. Eight weeks from today is November 18, which is 16 games. Twelve weeks is December 16, which pushes the total to 30 games.
There is also the matter of ramping him up to game speed. Returning to basketball activities and being ready to play NBA basketball are two different things. The original timeline wasn’t much of a concern because it wouldn’t have cost him as much conditioning. Taking a few weeks off isn’t great, but a guy like Williams can bounce back from that pretty quickly.
Being off the court for possibly three months is rough, and it will take a lot of conditioning and strengthening to get him to 100%. Whatever the timeframe is to get back onto the court is one thing. Getting him from healed to 30 minutes of NBA basketball a night is much different.
On top of that, it’s obviously incredibly important to make sure Williams is as healthy as possible when he starts back up. He needs to be fully ready, at full strength, and prepared to jump and land and get jostled down low.
Hopefully he’ll be at full speed at some point in December and ready to finish the season strong. In the meantime, this puts more pressure on the backups to prove they can handle the job for longer, and for Brad Stevens to pull the trigger on a move to shore up the front line if they can’t.
Things are already bad enough for this team to start the season. They can’t afford things getting much worse.
