BOSTON — This is what Kelly Olynyk looked like when he walked onto the court for Wednesday night’s game:
[tweet https://twitter.com/SeanGrandePBP/status/583399877842837504 align=’center’]
The Celtics big man’s egg-sized lump — the aftereffects of a laceration that required four stitches to close — was the result of a pregame run-in with teammate and regular 1-on-1 partner Shavlik Randolph.
“We were doing our normal pregame drills,” Randolph explained before Wednesday’s matchup with the Indiana Pacers at TD Garden. “We were playing 1-on-1. He got me on a pump fake and just jumped into my arm. I’m surprised he got up. He got hit pretty hard. … When I went down, it took about 30 minutes for me to feel my arm again. I knew his head had gotten hit hard.”
Had it ever. In the words of head coach Brad Stevens, the area above Olynyk’s left eye “exploded.” Randolph was hurting after the collision, too, showing a visible lump on his forearm he says he’ll have to cover with a protective pad for the next few days.
“(Olynyk) asked me how it looked,” Randolph said, “and I told him he looked like Rocky, from right before Rocky told Mickey to cut him. And I’m being dead serious — that’s literally how he looked. It was pretty bad. He took it like a man. He got up, and if you didn’t see the golf ball of his eye, you would have thought nothing had happened to him.”
Olynyk toughed it out. After Stevens initially declared him “very unlikely” to play against the Pacers, the second-year center participated in warmups, checked into the game late in the first quarter and buried a 3-pointer on his first touch.
Thumbnail photo via Twitter/@SeanGrandePBP
