The insane psychology of Celtics “injury risk”

On Sunday and Monday nights, Celtics fans were treated to a crisp back-to-back of games ending in the total embarrassment of a wildly inferior opponent. The first of which saw the Wizards—who have won fewer games at their home Capital One Arena this season than the NC State Wolfpack did on their way to win the ACC Tournament—trot out a squad of players so horrible that the Celtics probably could have rested half their team and come away with a comfortable victory.

Oh wait, they did do that! Celtics mainstays Derrick White, Jaylen Brown, and Kristaps Porzingis all sat out with smiles plastered on their faces as Jayson Tatum and Sam Hauser combined for 60 points in front of a “Wizards” crowd that gave the former MVP chants and the latter a standing ovation.

After possibly the least stressful road game of his career, Tatum was asked about his decision to suit up in such a lopsided affair, even while on the injury report with a left ankle impingement.

“I don’t like to sit out,” Tatum said, matter-of-factly.

He elaborated further, acknowledging that he would sit if truly injured while also emphasizing how he takes pride in suiting up for the fans that don his #0 and come to see him hoop. He just loves to play basketball, and doesn’t take for granted that his physical prime only includes so many games.

However, on the second night of a back-to-back, Tatum conceivably yielded to the wishes of Celtics training staff and sat the second game, with Porzingis, White, and Brown returning to unceremoniously dispatch of the Pistons. All in two days’ work.

Resting travel back-to-backs isn’t anything revolutionary, but when taken with his comments after the Wizards game, Tatum is unknowingly providing a launchpad to discuss one of the silliest topics in the burnt stir-fry of NBA discourse: superstar injury risk.

I’m going to get the housekeeping out of the way before we do any fun stuff. Yes, plenty of stars miss games with actual injuries, but the league oversight on what constitutes an “injury” is positively horrendous. Unless the league intends to usurp individual teams’ personnel decisions, a star player can miss any game they want with left thumb soreness and call it an afternoon.

Tatum’s “left ankle impingement” that sidelined him for the Pistons game is probably real, but hasn’t seemed too serious as he puts together likely his third consecutive All-NBA First Team-level campaign.

Instead, let’s focus on real injuries for the time being. Save for a few very specific outliers, injuries are either freak accidents or the result of long term strain on a particular body part. Joel Embiid tore his meniscus when Jonathan Kuminga dolphin dove on top of it, but no one saw that coming until it happened. Kristaps Porzingis’ left knee, on the other hand, has been an issue since the late 2010s and will continue to be going forward considering the near-decade of wear and tear it’s endured.

Tatum has been one of the most durable players in the league ever since he was drafted. He’s started in every single playoff game the Celtics have played in since he showed up, and continues to put together marathon seasons while taking very little time off, even leading the NBA in total scoring last regular season.

But no player seven years deep is without battle scars. Tatum played through a partially fractured wrist in the 2022 NBA Finals, and has managed this left ankle issue all season, though it’s one of those injuries that you begin to question the validity of when he plays through it constantly.

The Celtics are staring down an awkward stretch of seven-to-nine-ish games where they are likely to have mathematically clinched the number one seed in the Eastern Conference. Games will then become literally meaningless until the playoffs begin, and we will all rightly wonder if the Celtics stars—Tatum foremost among them—should actually be playing in these games.

Answer number one is oh-my-god-no-absolutely-not-why-would-you-even-suggest-such-a-thing-wrap-the-entire-team-in-bubble-wrap-until-mid-April-and-maybe-just-keep-Porzingis-in-bubble-wrap-just-to-be-safe. If that’s you, I feel you.

Completely meaningless games are a true rarity in the NBA, with most teams having only one or two each year and playoff seeding gridlocks in the final few days of the season. The 2023-2024 Celtics—who, on paper, are starting to look like one of the most dominant regular season teams ever—could have as many as twelve meaningless games if the Milwaukee Bucks and Cleveland Cavaliers lose their next three games and the Celtics win all three.

Much more likely is the seven-to-nineish range, but even the possibility of clinching the one seed with 12 games remaining speaks how badly the Celtics have bludgeoned the Eastern Conference for the better part of five months.

Photo by Stephen Gosling/NBAE via Getty Images

A natural instinct, then, is the Bubble Wrap Response. It feels insane to put anyone in the Celtics potential playoff rotation at risk of a Kuminga-Embiid situation when they are quite literally playing for nothing. Nor would the Celtics want their guys to accumulate any more miles before a brutal two-month playoff run that will test every ounce of resolve this team has in the canister.

Quick factual interlude: I have no idea what the legality of doing that would actually be, as while players are allowed to “rest” non-nationally televised games, I’m not exactly sure what that NBA would do if the Celtics trotted out Svi Mykhailiuk and Oshae Brissett for 47 minutes every game for two and a half weeks.

Even so, I don’t think the Celtics would—or even should—do this, as they want to stay warm for the playoffs and not start a mini vacation when the whole team is about to go zero dark thirty. They’d probably ease up pretty hard, but Tatum’s comments lead one to believe he would want to play regardless of playoff status. Should he?

From the NBA’s perspective, Tatum’s mindset is solid gold, and has almost certainly come up in various NBA-TV network negotiations over the next media rights deal. Here’s how I imagine those conversations went.

“Look! Look here ESPN and TNT, glorious TV networks poised to pay us billions of dollars over the next decade for exclusive rights to air our games,” said the NBA to the TV networks. “Look at the meritorious Jayson Tatum, proclaiming his intention to play in all games—meaningless, lopsided, or otherwise—for the love of the game! What wonderful stars we have in this league, don’t you think?”

The TV networks would retort that, yes—while Tatum is a wonderfully marketable player who thinks load management is a swear word—the rest of the league’s superstars think very differently. Joel Embiid, Kawhi Leonard, James Harden, these guys have been missing games with minor injuries for years on end, and Tatum’s mindset is certainly the outlier. But those three guys also have not-winning-anything-all-that-recently on their timesheets, while durability tanks like Nikola Jokic and Giannis Antetokounmpo run the league.

The preservation of a killer instinct is the best argument for the Celtics’ stars continuing to play through abject meaninglessness, though such a nebulous concept is unlikely to hold up in the court of public opinion should Jaylen Brown break his hand on a dunk sitting 14 games clear of the Bucks with 10 games remaining. Don’t worry, I’ve already knocked on wood.

Also, these guys are professionals who play basketball for a living. If they want to play because it’s their love and passion to do so, nobody should tell them they can’t. Everyone understands their own process of getting amped for the playoffs, and if to Tatum that means playing in 79 of the Celtics’ 82 games? So be it.

The problem with figuring out the risk-reward of critical Celtics playing out the final games is the total irrelevance of the words “risk” and “reward” to the situation. The risk is the same as it always is, unless you’re a conspiracy theorist alleging that a rival team could go full Tonya Harding on one of the Celtics’ stars. In which case… yeah. Yeah.

It’s impossible to know if or when a guy will get injured, so most “analysis” of teams’ decisions with playing time and load management comes ex post facto, playing the results and taking victory laps. There’s a reason ex post facto laws are prohibited by the United States Constitution: they’re stupid.

At the end of the day, guys should play if they feel they can and sit if they feel they need to. It’s not going to make a catastrophic injury suck any less or more, so let the guys hoop if that’s what they want to do. Excuse me while I go knock on some more wood.