NEW YORK — Jayson Tatum went down in a heap as he dove for a loose ball with 3:08 to go in Boston’s Game 4 loss to New York. In the moment, no one really knew what had happened.
No one other than Tatum himself, it seems.
Jayson Tatum was helped off the court late in Game 4 after an apparent leg injury on this play. pic.twitter.com/UF8D4mxqlo
— ESPN (@espn) May 13, 2025
Tatum spun, writhed, pounded the floor, and grabbed at the back of his right ankle as trainers tended to him. He buried his face in a towel until he was picked up to be helped off, unable to put weight on his right leg. He held his head in his hands as he sat in a wheelchair and was brought to the back.
"Just shocked with that,” Al Horford said. “Just waiting to see what the results are."
Tatum is not one for prolonged histrionics, so watching him get helped off the floor hammered the point home. Boston’s best player might be done for a while.
“Obviously that's our brother, and you hate to see him go down,” Derrick White said. “We just know the type of guy he is, and it’s just tough to see him go down. (We’re) pretty low because of the game, and we just gotta find a way to win Game 5.”
The worst-case scenario is that Tuesday’s MRI will confirm the fears of a torn Achilles tendon in Tatum’s right leg. That could mean Tatum is done playing basketball until the Holidays. Yes, there is a Game 5 to be played, and a Game 4 to analyze, but in the immediate aftermath of losing their superstar, basketball became secondary.
“The loss is the loss,” Horford said. “More importantly, it's Jayson that I'm worried about. Just making sure that I'm there for him, and that's my priority."
The Celtics may be caring, but sports is a cruel world. The team has been shaken by what appears to be the first catastrophic injury of Tatum’s career, but Game 5 is still being played in Boston on Wednesday. The Celtics are still alive, at least for now.
“We're grown men, you know? Who hasn't had injuries? It's a part of this sport,” Kristaps Porzingis said. “We feel for him, of course. But we have to move forward. He doesn't want us to be sad and not playing our best basketball. So we're going to go out there and leave it all out there and live with the results.”
Tatum’s message to the team will undoubtedly be to play their best basketball without him and try to shock the world with a comeback.
“That’s the thing, we have the talent, we have a lot of talent,” Porzingis said. “We have the guys and we’ve shown in the past that we can play still really good basketball. Obviously, there’s no replacement for this guy, no? Like, this is a big hit for us, 100 percent. But again, we have to play with the hand we’re dealt right now, and this is it. … We’re gonna play with what we have.”
The Celtics still have enough to win Game 5. Jaylen Brown, bad knee and all, still exists. Porzingis, who hasn’t been anywhere close to himself but who says he feels better, still exists. The same group of champions who have found ways to excel in the past without key players still exist. There is no evidence that says they’ll be able to handle this moment, but there wasn’t any evidence that the Knicks would be up 3-1 in this series, either.
“I think tonight is tough,” Brown said. “I think everybody's kind of at a loss for words, just because, one, losing the game, but obviously the concern with JT. But we pick our heads back up tomorrow and go from there."
This isn’t the ending anyone had envisioned for these Celtics. This was all supposed to go very differently. In some ways, this is like the Fenway heist in Mazzulla’s favorite movie, The Town. This was supposed to be one more big score, but everything has gone awry and they’ve lost guys along the way.
All the Celtics can worry about now is Game 5. They have to win that one to get to the next one, so there's no reason to look past anything anymore. Only if they can pull it off on Wednesday can they worry about Game 6.
"Yeah, no question about it. It is an uphill battle,” Horford said. “But for our group, we have to turn that page quickly and do our first job, which is to win on Wednesday. That's the mindset. And as a group, we just have to rally together because, obviously, we've lost our leader and the guy that gets us going. We have to come together as a group."