Gordon Hayward is probable to play on Christmas against the Raptors thanks to the latest cortisone shot he received on his sore left foot.
Yes, he's had more than one cortisone shot. In fact, Hayward revealed at Tuesday's practice he's on No. 3 now.
"The first two did not help with the nerve pain. Hopefully, third time is the charm," he said.
As for the root of the cause, Hayward still isn't certain — which is among the things that have frustrated him throughout this process.
He knows the pain is nerve-related and the discomfort has moved around. Imaging has been done and things are fine structurally.
The strangest part is he's worked through the pain since the Celtics played in Cleveland on November 5, but during the times he wasn't playing — hand injury and Boston's five-day layoff — the pain didn't go away. It actually got worse.
"(I) figured out a way to play through it, but I think it was progressively getting worse when I wasn't playing, that's why we were trying to figure out solutions," Hayward said. "What can we do? For whatever reason, we tried a solution that made it worse, and that's why I couldn't play. That was the frustrating thing."
"I was super frustrated. Because I felt like, I broke my hand and this was a different issue that — I wasn't playing and you would think I could figure it out while my hand was broken. So the fact that it was getting worse was just something that was frustrating everybody. We were calling all around the country trying to figure it out. Hopefully we did."
One thing Hayward did feel confident about: he thinks this problem has to do with his major injury from his first year with the Celtics.
"I think it had everything to do with the prior injury," he said. "I didn't get hurt on my right foot, so when you have a traumatic event to your foot or your ankle, things are going to change inside of there that you don't know necessarily because they don't bug you, but things start to poke their head a little bit if it gets tweaked in some way or another."
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