Has the ReealGordon Hayward Arrived?

Has the Real Gordon Hayward Arrived Just in the Nick of Time for Celtics?
Stop me if you’ve heard this one about Gordon Hayward before this season. Keep reading if you sense that this time might just be different.

By Scott Souza - March 28, 2019
BOSTON – Stop me if you’ve heard this one about Gordon Hayward before this season.

Keep reading if you sense that this time might just be different.

Hayward’s return from last year’s gruesome, potentially career-threatening, injury did not follow the storybook everyone hoped it would. A tentative start, lingering caution and pain, recurrent setbacks, and ongoing doubt during the comeback turned the campaign into a series of fits, starts and legitimate concern if Hayward would ever again be the player he was before he went up for that fateful alley-oop in the first quarter of last season’s opener in Cleveland.


There were signs of progress – mostly in games against the Minnesota Timberwolves – and there was the instance from Celtics coach Brad Stevens that, despite the pedestrian point totals and long bouts of invisibility on the floor, Hayward was consistently “making the right basketball play.”


But as the weeks, and then the months, and then nearly the entire regular season, moved along, there was a growing reluctance from those who had been rooting for Hayward to break through all year to believe it was going to happen.

Believe it was going to happen this season. Believe it might ever happen again for the former All-Star.

Each time Hayward looked on the verge of a true renaissance to his former self something would get in his way. A December illness, a sprained ankle out of the All-Star break, a black eye earlier this month – although, admittedly, the black eye was pretty bad ass for a guy who spends that much time on his hair – and then a concussion with a month left in the regular season left the player, and those rooting for him, contemplating whether it was yet another lost year.



Coming out of the concussion, however, Hayward has looked like a different player. Not just a making-shots different player. Not just a making-the-right-basketball-play different player. But a player who has finally had enough with all the reasons he can’t be what he was, and has developed renewed resolve to prove he is still that guy.

“I have not,” Hayward said Wednesday afternoon at Auerbach Center when asked if he might sit out games late in the regular season to rest for the playoffs. “I think I did a lot of that early on with my ankle, and all of last year. I am definitely, as of right now, feeling pretty good – as long as I don’t get a random concussion, or anything like that.”

GH has played in 7 of the last 10 games.

He is averaging 10.4 PPG, 3.1 assists and 3.4 rebounds. Not bad for 23.6 MPG

However he is only shot 18.2% from deep and 65% from the line, 52% overall.

The answer is there is not a big enough sample size to determine if GH is back.