As the Celtics get ready for the Bulls tonight, Avery Bradley is trying to get himself back in the mix. The good news is that after a couple of days working out, all is going well… but he’s not coming back for a little while.
“We’ll try to get a few weeks of practice under my belt before I start thinking about playing in a game,” said Bradley, who underwent offseason surgery on both shoulders. “Right now we’re taking it day-by-day still, just seeing how I feel. As of now, I feel great.”
Celtics coach Doc Rivers had similar thoughts on Bradley’s first full-contact practice with the team in about six months.
“He practiced great, didn’t need a lot of rest,” Rivers said. “The good thing about a shoulder injury is that your legs could stay in shape.”
We’ll see what that means. The past few months has consisted of Bradley giving his own updates as to his recover and seemingly surprising Doc Rivers with them. This could be another one of those, or a little bit of a ruse coordinated by the team, or the truth. Regardless, we’ll have to wait and see how a few more practices treat Bradley.
As for this “savior” stuff…
I’m sick of media outlets over-simplifying things into one-sentence questions that can be horribly mis-interpreted.
Calling Bradley “the savior” makes it sound like we expect him to become LeBron James and carry the team out of the doldrums himself. What we are saying… and I say “we” because I know I’m not alone here… is that Bradley does the things the Celtics need done, and when he does them, other guys don’t have to. And when those other guys don’t have to, they can go back to doing their own job.
I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but it’s not Bradley alone that “saves” the Celtics. It’s the fact that Bradley allows the rest of the team to do better things that helps save the Celtics.
It’s semantics… sure… but saying “savior” carries with it connotations that only sustain talking heads on TV, and carry no weight in any real Celtics discussion..
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