– by Adesina O. Koiki
A Lot of Sports Talk editor-in-chief
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BOSTON — And here we thought the playoff demons and maladies that haunted Jayson Tatum in postseasons past were exorcised and ameliorated after the Celtics all but cakewalked to Banner No. 18 last summer. Well, the pursuit of a championship repeat started with a fairly routine victory for the team … yet another complication for Tatum that remains to be seen how long it will plague him and the Celtics’ championship hopes.
The good news for the Celtics on Sunday afternoon is their 103-86 victory over the Orlando Magic put them in a 1-0 series lead to start the NBA Playoffs first-round series inside TD Garden. The soon-to-be-bad-to-possibly-catastrophic news might be coming in the form of what we saw and might know about Jayson Tatum’s right wrist, as his arm was slapped by Orlando’s Kentavious Caldwell-Pope on what turned out to be a flagrant foul early in the fourth quarter before Boston’s superstar crashed onto the floor and laid on the ground as he fell hard and then clutched his right wrist in obvious pain.
Tatum had 17 points and 14 rebounds in 40 minutes, including a couple of tough fadeaway jumpers over Orlando’s top two players, Franz Wagner and Paolo Banchero, on isolation plays not too long after his hard fall. But the time he spent favoring his right wrist on the bench soon after he came out of the game for good, as well as him walking to the tunnel before the final buzzer while still holding said wrist, will surely cause time to stand still in Beantown between now and Wednesday’s Game 2 as a city hopes that Tatum’s well-documented bad luck with injuries during the postseason has reared its head again at the worst possible time once more.
*Editor’s note: Above the byline is the photo gallery from Sunday afternoon’s game, with photos taken by ALOST photo editor Erica Denhoff. After clicking on a photo to enlarge the picture, press the left and right arrow buttons on either side of the caption to scroll through the rest of the pictures that appear on the first page, Also, click on the numbers and/or arrow appearing immediately below the picture grid to load the next set of photos. There are 47 pictures in total.
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