Brown cleared for tilt with Bucks
Finally back to ‘100%’ after mending balky hamstring
Jaylen Brown admits that he rushed his first attempt to come back from a strained right hamstring after missing eight straight games in November.
Now that he’s been declared available for tonight’s game against the Bucks after missing another five following an unsuccessful five-game return, the young Celtics star said that for the first time since the start of the season he feels like himself.
“Just been adamantly working, trying to get back to how I felt before the season started,” he said following Sunday’s practice. “Coming into the year I felt like the best version of myself, in terms of my career. So I wanted to get back to that feeling and I’m moving in that direction. Obviously COVID kind of slowed me up a little bit when I started the season and I started to recover from that. Then hamstring injury, I thought it was going to be a week or two. It took a bit longer than I expected and now I’m starting to feel like how I felt originally, so just keep moving in the right direction.
“It definitely is smart for the long run,” Brown said of his decision not to rush back this time, forcing him to miss the entirety of the Celtics’ just-completed 1-4 western road trip, an experience that worsened the longer it went.
“I’ve had this same injury three times now over the course of my career and each time it’s gotten a little worse,” he said of the hamstring injury. “So trying to take the time to find out what’s causing the issue so it’s not recurring, so I can just move past it and look forward to the season. I wanted to come back just because I admire the fight — at times — the fight of this team defensively, how we’ve been all season prior to these last four or five games.
“We’ve hung our hat on defense and I wanted to be out there to fight with my teammates, but the medical staff suggested that we make sure that first off you protect yourself. I think I came back maybe a little too early before because I was not myself. And hamstrings are a little bit tricky so we were just taking time to figure it out. The organization and the medical