Boston Celtics: Jeff Green’s Continued Success More Than Just Basketball

Jeff Green is playing the best basketball of his NBA career over the last three months. Not bad for a guy who had open-heart surgery a little more than a year ago. Photo Credit: Mark Runyon, Basketball Schedule

When the Boston Celtics drafted forward Jeff Green out of Georgetown with the fifth overall pick in the 2007 NBA Draft, they had no plans to keep him and never thought he’d be coming back to Boston.

On draft night, the Celtics packaged Green with Wally Szczerbiak, Delonte West and a second-round pick in 2008 and sent him to the Seattle SuperSonics for Ray Allen and Glen Davis, who the Sonics had taken in the second round that night.

That trade, of course, was one of the ones that set the foundation in place for the NBA title the Celtics would win less than a year later.

For Green, he played one year in the Emerald City, scoring 10.5 points a game, for a Seattle team that won 20 games and moved to Oklahoma City the following summer.

Green had trouble finding minutes at small forward for the Thunder—alas, anyone stuck behind Kevin Durant would have trouble finding minutes at small forward—and instead moved to power forward for a young Oklahoma City team that also featured point guard Russell Westbrook.

In two years as the starting 4 for the Thunder, Green averaged 15.8 points and 6.3 rebounds per game while shooting 44.9 percent from the field and 35.8 percent from 3-point range.

A superstar in the making? No. A solid contributor for an emerging Western Conference power? Unquestionably.

That was until the trade deadline in 2011. Green was traded with Nenad Krstic and a 2012 first-round pick back to the Boston Celtics for Kendrick Perkins and Nate Robinson.

The Thunder would go on to make a stunning run to the conference finals while Green struggled to find a role in Boston.

Before the trade, Green averaged 15.2 points and 5.6 boards in 49 starts. With the Celtics, his minutes shrank from 37 a night to just 23.5 and he scored only 9.8 points a game.

Then there was the diagnosis.

After the lockout ended in December 2011, Green reported for his annual physical before the abbreviated training camp.

An aortic aneurysm was detected during the examination and instead of getting ready for his first full season as a Celtic, Green was off to the Cleveland Clinic for open-heart surgery to repair the condition.

After he missed all of the 2011-12 season, Green returned to the C’s and again struggled to find a role. In his first 42 games, Green played just 23.2 minutes a game and averaged 9.4 points while shooting just 42.5 percent from the floor and 32.5 percent from deep.

He came off the bench to score 17 points on Jan. 25 in Atlanta—the same game during which Rajon Rondo suffered a season-ending knee injury—and has been a different player since.

Over his last 36 games, Green has started 14 times, played 32.9 minutes a night and is scoring 16.4 points a game. His field-goal percentage over that span is 49.8 percent and he is a sizzling 43.5 percent shooter from 3-point range.

On March 27 in Cleveland, Green hit a game-winning layup to snap a five-game losing streak for the C’s. And after it was over, Green found Dr. Lars Svensson at courtside. Svensson performed the surgery on Green in January 2012 and received a huge hug.

Suddenly that four-year, $36 million free-agent contract Green received last summer doesn’t look so bad after all.

The inconsistency that haunted Green for much of his career has vanished in the second half of this season. In its place is a solid, steady contributor for Boston.

“He’s shown a lot of flashes this year,” Paul Pierce told the Patriot-Ledger of Quincy, Mass., on April 4. “A lot of times, teams come into these games really focused on what I’m trying to do. You’ve got a guy like Jeff who can put up big numbers like that, take over a game, it’s fun to watch.”

Coach Doc Rivers has said it’s “very possible” (per WEEI.com’s Green Street blog) that Green and Pierce will be together in the starting lineup after Kevin Garnett returns to action.

It’s great for Green that he’s finally starting to live up to the potential that merited his high selection in the draft.

But regardless of what Jeff Green does on the basketball court, he’s already a winner, just by making it back from a condition that was literally a matter of life and death.

After facing that sort of a challenge, how much trouble is it to deal with the occasional double team, right?