Boston Celtics center Kristaps Porzingis dunks during a Celtics’ victory over the Dallas Mavericks in March. (Staff Photo/Stuart Cahill/Boston Herald)
The Celtics on Tuesday confirmed center Kristaps Porzingis will undergo surgery to repair the “rare” leg injury he suffered during the NBA Finals.
The surgery “will be performed in the coming days,” per the team, and will prevent Porzingis from playing for his native Latvia in the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris next month.
“Porzingis had hoped to delay surgery until after both the NBA Finals and Latvia’s Olympic campaign,” a team statement read, “but the injury doesn’t allow for consistent play at the level required for Olympic competition.”
The team did not offer a timeline for Porzingis’ return to the court, nor did president of basketball operations Brad Stevens, who held his pre-draft news conference Tuesday morning.
“Kristaps is still in the middle of consulting with some different doctors and specialists, but we anticipate surgery will be soon,” Stevens said. “And then we’ll have more of an update for timeline of recovery after the surgery.”
A different injury — a soleus strain in his right calf — caused Porzingis to miss 10 games early in Boston’s playoff run, including the entire Eastern Conference semifinals and finals. He was highly impactful off the bench in Games 1 and 2 of the NBA Finals against Dallas before suffering his second injury, which the team called “a torn retinaculum and dislocated posterior tibialis tendon” in his left leg.
Porzingis sat out Games 3 and 4, then played 16 minutes in last Monday’s Game 5 clincher at TD Garden, with head coach Joe Mazzulla saying the 7-foot-2 big man overruled the Celtics’ medical staff to do so.
“It pretty much hurts on every step,” Porzingis, who called the injury “a heartbreaking moment,” said after Game 5. “Like, I would take a walk in Dallas, and my leg would swell up. I was like, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to play, if I’m going to play.’ But my mindset was always, I’m going to try to find a way how I can manage this. And somehow I got it going for this game.”
Acquired in a blockbuster trade last June, Porzingis started 57 games during the regular season, averaging 20.1 points, 7.2 rebounds and a team-high 1.9 blocks per game. Though his injuries wiped out most of his postseason and visibly limited his mobility in the NBA Finals, the Celtics outscored the Mavericks by 33 points when he was on the floor, the best mark of any player.
Porzingis is signed through the 2025-26 season.
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