Boston Celtics star Jayson Tatum didn’t just make his long-awaited return on Friday, he stuffed the stat sheet to the tune of 15 points, 12 rebounds and seven assists in 27 minutes. It was a celebratory night for the Celtics, who beat the Dallas Mavericks 120-100 on national TV.
Well, it was celebratory for most of the Celtics. Nikola Vučević broke his right finger in the first quarter. He had surgery on Saturday morning to repair the fracture on Saturday morning, the team announced. Vučević will be reevaluated in 3-4 weeks.
Vučević, 35, was Boston’s big — in a literal sense — trade-deadline acquisition. “When Vooch walks into the room, it looks different,” team president Brad Stevens said at a press conference last month. “He’s big and long and strong and can be standing next to anybody in this league and not look small.” If he misses exactly four weeks, then he’d be back in the lineup for the last five games of the regular season. In 12 games since the trade, Vučević has averaged 10.4 points, 7.2 rebounds and 1.8 assists in 21.6 minutes per game while shooting 35.1% from 3-point range.
This isn’t an enormous setback for the Celtics. While Vučević is out, Luka Garza can slide into the backup-center role that he had for most of the season. Garza is not the same kind of pick-and-pop threat or passer as Vučević is, but he plays hard, screens hard, hits the offensive glass hard and has made 43% of his 3-point attempts — albeit at relatively low volume and mostly wide open — this season.
It’s a bit of a bummer, though, because Vučević was still finding his footing in Boston. He’s coming off the bench after being a starter for virtually his entire career, and, after his 28-point explosion against the Brooklyn Nets last week, he told reporters (via CLNS Media) that he was “still getting used to, obviously, the new offense, and all my teammates, learning their tendencies and things like that, finding my ways. At times I feel like I overthink a little bit, which makes me kind of hesitant and takes away my aggressiveness.”
Ideally, Vučević would have continued to get more comfortable in his new situation over the next few weeks and found a nice rhythm going into the playoffs. Now he’ll have to watch from the sideline for a while, then try to get up to speed. In particular, this injury robs him of about a month’s worth of reps playing next to Tatum. The two will have to try to develop chemistry on the fly.
The Celtics traded Anfernee Simons for Vučević in part because they wanted to get under the luxury tax and in part because they wanted to, as Stevens put it, “balance out our positional needs.” Particularly now that Tatum is back, Boston feels good about its playmaking on the perimeter. It saw Vučević as an upgrade over Garza, and also as insurance in the event that either starting center Neemias Queta or Garza gets hurt. For the next month or so, Boston is in the same position as it was before the deadline when it comes to frontcourt depth. It has been blessed with near-perfect health (Tatum excluded, obviously) this season, and if that continues, they should fare just fine. If either Queta or Garza gets banged up, though, coach Joe Mazzulla will have to turn to smallball or give rookie Amari Williams a shot.
Williams has had his moments, by the way, and he’s put up some monster numbers in the G League. Given how much these Celtics have gotten out of young, unproven players, I’m fully expecting him to swing a game down the stretch.
