It may not happen this season, but Gordon Hayward’s agent is confident the Boston Celtics forward soon will regain the ability that earned him a max contract with the team.
Hayward’s agent, Mark Bartelstein, appeared Friday on WEEI’s “Late Night with Patrick Gilroy,” where he said a full off-season could help his client return to his former glory.
“There’s no doubt in my mind,” Bartelstein said. “My guess is he doesn’t get his game all the way back where we’re accustomed to seeing it until next year. He’s going to need a summer to get back in the gym and get back in the laboratory and the weight room and build on everything he did last year. But there’s not a doubt in my mind. He’ll be an All-Star in this league many, many times over.
” … I don’t think people understand the severity of the injury, the second surgery, missing an entire season and a summer where you can’t really go work on your game. These are things you can’t place the proper value on, so he’s trying to do this in the course of the season. That’s a difficult thing to do, because you don’t even really practice much during the course of the season, the games come so fast.”
Hayward hasn’t met expectations after returning from an ankle injury that sidelined him for nearly the entire 2017-18 season. He is averaging just 10.8 points a game this season, a sharp decline from the 21.9 point average he held two years ago with the Utah Jazz.
But Bartelstein said he believes Hayward will return to his All-Star form.
“He’ll be right back where we’re used to seeing him,” he said, per WEEI. “Everybody just needs to be a little patient with him, that’s all.”
