Boston Celtics forward Gordon Hayward has recently resumed running and other basketball activities, according to Celtics president of basketball operations Danny Ainge.
“Before he left, he was running out on the basketball court,” Ainge told Adam Himmelsbach of The Boston Globe. “He was back to resuming basketball activities. It feels great.”
Hayward missed almost the entire 2017-18 season after breaking his leg in the first quarter of the season opener. Earlier this offseason, Hayward underwent surgery to remove the plate and screws that were implanted following the broken fibula he suffered on Oct. 17.
Hayward detailed the reason for this procedure in a recent post on his blog title, “Won’t Be Long Now“:
I had been progressing really well. I had been doing cuts laterally. I was jumping. I hadn’t done anything that explosive and I wasn’t quite 100 percent with any of it, but I was slowly building up to that.
Problem was, I was also still having some pain on the outside of my ankle, kind of where the peroneal tendon is. I had been reporting back daily how I was feeling, and the team that I was working with in Indianapolis—along with the Celtics training staff—had surmised that it could be the hardware they put in during my initial surgery causing some irritation
…
So I called up Dr. Porter, who collaborated on my surgery and who’s advised us throughout this process, just to ask what he thought. I explained to him what was going on, and he said it could be a couple different things, so we should do a test to figure out what it is. He told me that it could just be that my muscles were sore, and it was a strength issue, and I just needed to continue to rehab and have it get stronger, and eventually, it would go away. Or it could be something different.
On May 31, the Celtics were minutes away from their first Finals berth in eight years. However, they lost in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finalsto the Cleveland Cavaliers — a remarkable feat considering they reached that game without injured stars Hayward and Kyrie Irving.
Irving missed the final 15 games of the 2017-18 season and the entire playoffs to repair his left knee. Roughly a week ago, Celtics coach Brad Stevens told reporters he is hopeful that Irving could return to the court sometime in August.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
