The NBA world got a collective punch to the gut on Tuesday night as an established superstar went down with a gruesome injury. During the league’s season opener between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Boston Celtics, new Celtics forward Gordon Hayward suffered a fractured left ankle. It was the kind of thing that made the entire game stop, Quicken Loans Arena fall silent, and the Cavs’ bench run away so they didn’t have to look at what happened.
Bench reax pic.twitter.com/QQ2l9N1eD0
— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) October 18, 2017
Hayward was taken off the floor on a stretcher, brought into the back, and eventually moved from the Cavs’ locker room to the Celtics’ locker room. But before that happened, a few members of the Cavaliers made it a point to show Hayward some love.
After the first half ended, both LeBron James and Isaiah Thomas went to the back to check on Hayward.
LeBron James just went into Cavs locker room where Gordon Hayward is receiving medical attention
— Brian Windhorst (@WindhorstESPN) October 18, 2017
Isaiah Thomas, who recruited Hayward to Boston over summer, has also been with him in locker room.
— Brian Windhorst (@WindhorstESPN) October 18, 2017
It’s a cool gesture from both players, albeit not a surprising one — James is the vice president of the players’ association, and as Windhorst pointed out, Thomas worked really hard to convince Hayward to join the Celtics in free agency before the All-NBA guard was traded to Cleveland for Kyrie Irving.
In moments like this — when a person suffers an injury that will impact their livelihood for a long period of time — any little bit of optimism is always good to see. While we only got a second-hand report of this moment of solidarity between Hayward and a few members of the Cavaliers, it was still good to see that James and Thomas understood that basketball really wasn’t all that important for a few minutes.
