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Tim BontempsESPN
Boston Celtics forward Jayson Tatum said Tuesday night that he was still dealing with the consequences of contracting COVID-19 three months ago and that he used a pre-match inhaler to combat it.
“Close,” he said, after scoring 32 points, along with nine rebounds and five assists, in a 116-115 victory in Boston, Portland, on whether he was back to 100 percent. “Very close.
“It’s a process. It takes a long time. I take an inhaler before the game as I tested positive. It helped so much and opened my lungs, and, you know, I’ve never taken an inhaler. So this is something else.
“I must be feeling better now than I did a month ago.”
He added that he was not sure how long he would have to use the inhaler, saying it would take until he felt good enough to play without it.
“There is no exact timetable,” Tatum said. “[It’s] only if I feel comfortable enough and think I do not need it. ‘
Tatum’s strong performance Tuesday night – including the resounding three-pointer to go with 8.5 seconds – was his youngest in a series of late, coincidentally coinciding with Boston’s best piece of the season. The win in Portland was Boston’s sixth in its last seven games, and the Celtics have a chance to go 3-0 on this West Coast turn if they can beat their eternal opponents, the Los Angeles Lakers, in Staples Center on Thursday night. .
Over his last ten games, Tatum averaged 29.4 points while shooting just under 50% from the field and just under 40% from the three-point series – including a career-best 53 points in Boston’s overtime win over Minnesota Timberwolves Friday night.
Perhaps some of it can be tied back to Tatum’s continued progress with the impact of COVID-19, something that several of his teammates have also had to go through over the past few months. Tatum pointed out that after the game, it partly explained Boston’s disappointing season so far.
“I don’t think our record shows what kind of team we are,” Tatum said. “I think even though it’s been a weird year, we’re obviously handled a few things, excuse me, of course a lot of things. Okay, a lot of guys have tested positive, and some guys have been injured. But you know now mostly we miss Evan [Fournier]. But most guys are healthy. I just like the way we play. Every game is important at the moment, and we know it’s on point.
“Of course we want to win. But I think for myself, we, to play the right way and feel good about ourselves. We are not going to win every game, but I think we are playing the right way and we are for sure in the right direction. ‘
However, Celtics coach Brad Stevens sees that his young star did the same thing he did at the same point last season, when he took off in the weeks before the All-Star game in Chicago and never looked back. .
“It’s about the time, the number of games, where he started to rise last year,” Stevens said. “And you can see it in the last so many weeks. You can see that he’s really in a rhythm to know what he wants to do in a given possession and also where his opportunities are going to come from. And, again, it helps if they have all four of those guys there, because then sometimes you can not load him like sometimes earlier in the year. ‘
Boston needed that brilliance in each of the last three games, in which Tatum scored more than 100 points and reached the free-throw line a total of 34 times. And after finally gaining momentum, the Celtics are hoping they can keep it up.
“We are not excited, we are not complacent, we are not happy with it,” Marcus Smart said. “It’s a start, a start of what we know we need to do. We’ve dug a hole for ourselves. We know we need to keep fighting, but it’s encouraging. We’re using it as momentum to build on. “The next game and try to bring the same energy with these victories to the next game. And that’s really our spirit. We’re not too high on the highs, and we’s not too low on the lows.”