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Tim BontempsESPN
SALT LAKE CITY – While Gordon Hayward was moving away from basketball between the long hours of rehab and the good times spent with his family, the Boston Celtics striker would find about an hour to escape, connect to his computer and skip "League of Legends", the popular multiplayer online game.
"It just distracted my mind, especially the nights when I really could not sleep," Hayward told ESPN. "I thought of a lot of different things.
"It was a chance to hang out, talk to friends, let me think about that."
So, when Riot Games, the company behind the game, came to Hayward with the idea of playing a role in an advertisement, he embraced the idea of building it around the similarities between his scenario and that of his favorite character – Tryndamere, a barbarian. King with a particular skill: the ability to come back to life when he is about to die.
If Gordon Hayward expects to regret and long when he returns to Utah on Friday, he will be disappointed. The Jazz are gaga against Donovan Mitchell now.
The Celtics have one of the worst offenses in the league, but Kyrie Irving & Co. are optimistic, they will recover and silence critics.
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"Just before he dies, he can launch his ultimate [skill]"Hayward says." Then he has a period of time where he is fortifying, essentially.
"When I spoke to them, I thought it was perfectly in line with what had happened, my rehabilitation and my return."
On Friday night, Hayward will return to the home ground of the Vivint Smart Home Arena for the first time since his decision to leave Utah Jazz as a free agent to join the Celtics in July 2017. However, he will not do it. All-Star he was when he left – at least, not yet.
Instead, he returns as a player still in the midst of recovery after suffering the most traumatic event of his life in basketball, losing every six minutes of last season after suffering a tibial fracture. left and an ankle dislocated during a fall in Boston. Opening season in Cleveland. Hayward is still becoming the hard-hitting piece the Celtics were to add to their list 18 months ago.
The time it takes for this recovery phase could very well be the difference between Boston facing a third consecutive appearance in the finals of the Eastern Conference – or celebrating the franchise's first trip to the finals of the NBA in almost ten years.
Even under ideal circumstances, catching a missed season would take time. Basketball, as much as any sport, is a game based on timing, rhythm and precision. All these traits require constant practice and repetition to perfect themselves; spending a year watching them atrophy requires even more work to bring them back to life.
That's where Hayward, 28, is when he returns to where he spent the first seven years of his career in the NBA. For every step forward, like her performance last week against Milwaukee Bucks (18 points, 4 rebounds and 5 assists in 27 minutes), there are reminders of her missed time, as her performance two nights later against her home town, Indiana Pacers, when fired 2 out of 10 and scored 4 points in 26 minutes. Hayward has already had five five-digit numbers in just 10 games. he has played six such matches throughout his last season with the Jazz.
An incoherent beginning, however, was to be expected. Not only does Hayward have a limit of minutes, a limit that holds him every night in his mid-twenties and has made him play several times throughout the match, but there is also this muscle memory to recover.
Even though his season has started slowly, there are glimmers of hope for the future – times when the player that he was and that he hopes to be again shows up for a moment. One of them intervened in this game against the Bucks, when Hayward weighed all his weight on his left leg – the first time since his life-changing injury in Cleveland the year last – after trying to block a shot.
As such moments occur, and Hayward continues to pass through them unharmed, he will continue to come closer to returning to the player he was before.
"I think catching up on a driveway, up and down … I know I think only one for me could go and immobilize it in traffic," Hayward said. "I'm kind of busting with people around me.There are a lot of things that I do not really anticipate in my head that occur naturally in a game, so I hope to do it without thinking. "
"I do it instinctively, then everything is fine."
In a sport that makes decisions of a split second, the difference between thinking and reacting is often the difference between winning and losing. As this rust continues to move away from Hayward 's game, more and more instinct is emerging and the thinking is going away.
Even through these first 10 games, the Celtics center Al Horford saw Hayward's growth on that front.
"The way he attacks the pick-and-roll ball," said Horford. "When you set a big screen, it attacks, it goes to the basket, and it starts to feel comfortable at the end.
"The first two games, he could have done it several times, but he was stopping quickly and pulling it up – it's a way for me to watch the progress right away."
Beyond just finding his skills on the ground, Hayward returns to an unknown environment. He has hardly played since appearing in the Jazz as a hub of everything they did with head coach Quin Snyder. While Celtics coach Brad Stevens, who recruited him at Butler University, is obviously a familiar face, Hayward finds himself on a list filled with other scoring options.
And although it certainly has its place in the hierarchy, the former choice is now to know where it will fall among stars like Horford and Kyrie Irving, but also young stars like Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, who flourished in the absence of Hayward there is a season. This balancing exercise adds another degree of difficulty to what was already going to be a long way to go for Hayward.
To this end: Hayward, who has scored 9.9 points per game so far this season, ranks sixth among the Celtics in scoring; Since his rookie season, he has never been outside the top three in any of the teams where he has been.
"It's a transition in many ways," Stevens said. "In the end, there is a physical transition, there is a transition of a few minutes, there is a game with a new group and a reintegration into the group.
"He has had great times, like everyone else, we just need to be more consistent among our group to have those good times more and more often."
This partly explains the start of the season slower than expected Boston. And it was all the more difficult to find Hayward to the player that he was before.
"All of this together is just … a lot to deal with," said Hayward.
"It's a process," added Horford. "With Gordon, I've seen improvements between the first and the tenth game.But I think that with him, people have to understand that he's missing all year." It's not just about coming back from an injury and feeling good about yourself, but also trying to mesh with our group that has already been established.
"It takes time, there is no way around it."
Time is something that Hayward and the Celtics still have a lot of. A comeback in Phoenix Thursday night propelled Boston to 7-4, just over three weeks into the regular season. While the dollars and The Toronto Raptors have put a bit of space between them and Boston since the beginning. The Celtics are not playing yet.
The most important goal to achieve in the coming months, between the start of the series and mid-April, is not to get the best seed of the Eastern Conference series, nor to reward their players individually. Instead, it was to bring Hayward back to the player that he was – or at least as close to that level as Boston possibly can.
In the meantime, he will review this mental checklist by checking the mini-milestones as he goes along. And although it's not the same as finishing an alley or finishing a chased block, one of those milestones will cross the point of Friday's match, even if it does not have the same whistle. # 39; pregame. would have had last season.
This is true not only because of the delayed return caused by Hayward's injury, but also because of the successes of both teams last season without him. The flourishing of Donovan Mitchell in Utah and Tatum in Boston meant that both franchises had managed to flourish without the player whose departure from one and the arrival with the other would have had such a decisive impact.
"These are just circumstances that have occurred," said Hayward. "With me, I face everything I had to do, and they had a year to move on … they had a good year last year.
"I have only respect for the people who are on the Jazz and for what they have done for me, but that 's not something I have thought of. "
It's hard to blame Hayward for being concerned. After all, he had more than enough to focus on to get back to what, no doubt, will remain a hostile crowd in Utah.
However, nothing that he hears from the stands will be more difficult to handle than the thoughts that go through it during the sleepless nights of last year, when Tryndamere in the game world replaced the one that was playing. he was planning to have with Irving and Horford basketball one.
"When I started playing the game, it was someone that people who taught me to play said," Play like him, it is easy enough, "he said. said Hayward. "Then, the more I played him, the more I liked his way of playing.
"You are the guy who could lead your team to a win, so I enjoyed it at home."
Now that he is healthy, Hayward hopes to do the same for the Celtics.
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