Fifteen months after his horrific ankle injury, Gordon Hayward is back at the scene of the crime on Tuesday night. Even with three months of game action under his belt now, Hayward is still searching for a consistency that has been fleeting since his return and left the former All-Star visibly frustrated at times this season.

Given the amount of time that’s passed, it’s fair to wonder if the Celtics should be getting more out of Hayward. Maybe that’s why it was so interesting to hear Paul George plead for continued patience with Hayward in the aftermath of Oklahoma City’s visit to Boston on Sunday.

George, a sympathetic ear during Hayward’s recovery, needed just eight months to return from a gruesome leg injury. George got six games under his belt at the tail end of the 2014-15 season and then seemed to hit the ground running the following year, posting a career best in scoring while earning All-Star honors during the 2015-16 campaign.

The natural instinct is to look at the timelines and suggest Hayward should be closer to the player he used to be in Utah and not the one that saw half of his six shot attempts blocked by Oklahoma City on Sunday.

What that ignores is the follow-up procedure Hayward endured in late May. He didn’t return to full basketball activities until right before the start of training camp and didn’t get the sort of ramp-up that a typical NBA offseason might afford.

George was staunch in his declaration that Hayward can’t beat himself up over the lack of consistency to this point.

"Honestly, just don’t be so hard on yourself,” said George. "I was fortunate when I got hurt. The following season I got to play six games and that kind of helped me into the transition. Fact of the matter is everyone is expecting Gordon to be Gordon from Utah and he’s not. He has to take strides, take steps along the way.”

Complicating matters is that Hayward has shown glimpses of turning a corner. He’s had a couple of loud performances — like a 30-point outing in Minnesota in early December — and strung together maybe his best stretch of games at the start of January.

Each time, Hayward hasn’t been able to harness the momentum. He’s fought his shot at times — although it should be noted that George’s shooting percentages dove in his first season back as well — and Hayward has shown obvious frustration, even as he’s told himself not to get too high or too low about his performances.

George encouraged Hayward to ignore those in a rush to point out how his play isn’t commensurate with his team-high $31.2 million salary.

"Fans can’t be too hard on him and he can’t be too hard on himself. The game is different,” said George. "When you sit out a year and you try to come back, the game is totally different from where you left it. He’s got to adapt, find his game, find his rhythm, block out the noise that people are expecting him to be himself right away.

"It takes time. When I got hurt, the doctors told me it would be two to three years before I would feel the way I feel now. Despite them saying I would make a full recovery, it wouldn’t be until two or three years. It’s a long marathon for him. He’ll be alright.”

Watching George play his way into some MVP chatter this season should be an example of how a player can not only find his form but even go to another level with enough time. Even though George has been excellent the past three seasons, his scoring average is up more than six points per game this year and he’s shooting the ball as well as he has his entire career.

It’d be fascinating to know where Hayward might be without that second surgery in May to remove nagging hardware. Even if he hadn’t been able to get back on the court before Boston’s playoff run ended, maybe having the summer to ramp up his basketball activities would have allowed him to enter the season with more confidence.

It didn’t happen. He’s been forced to work through the bumps with everybody watching and questioning whether he’ll get back to the player he used to be. The Celtics have preached patience to Hayward, hoping that he’ll find more consistency as the year goes on.

“Hopefully he’ll continue to get more comfortable. And by game 60 and 80, he’ll feel better than he does at 40 and 20,” Celtics coach Brad Stevens said last month.

A glimpse at the box score Sunday suggests a rough day for Hayward, who missed five of the six shots he took and got swatted three times (including once by George). But Hayward was also aggressive going at the basket, an encouraging sign that he’s trying to be more assertive. He’s had a propensity to avoid contact at times early in the season and settle for perimeter shots. To get back to the old Hayward, he has to be fearless going at the hoop.

When the Celtics were in Cleveland in November, coach Brad Stevens made it a point to run an alley-oop lob almost identical to the one Hayward was injured on back in October 2017. Stevens has run similar actions a few times this year and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see it come out again this trip (in part because these rebuilding Cavs don’t put a heavy emphasis on defense).

But anything that can get Hayward out of his own head and playing with more confidence would be a good thing for these Celtics.

For all his individual woes, Hayward still owns a net rating of plus-5.2 this season. That’s a solid number; it’s simply diminished by how good the team has been when he’s off the floor, the Celtics posting a plus-9.4 net rating without Hayward (though that might simply reflect on a bench unit that’s struggled to find consistency as a group).

At times this season it’s felt like Hayward’s emergence might be the key to just how far the Celtics might surge this season. If you think that’s an overstatement, consider this: Basketball Reference tracks a metric called Game Score that attempts to quantify a player’s game performance based on box score stats. It’s noisy but, ultimately, a score south of the teens is average at best (while a score in the 40s is a dominant effort)

This season, when Hayward has posted a Game Score of 14.5 or better, the Celtics are 9-1 and that includes two wins over Toronto and another over Milwaukee — the only two teams that currently sit ahead of Boston in the East standings. In the 35 other games, in which Hayward’s Game Score was 11.9 or lower, Boston is 21-17.

Boston’s success doesn’t hinge on Hayward, but it certainly could go a long way to making these Celtics look more like the East power that was expected. Even as Boston starts to play more consistent ball and surge up the standings, having a confident and consistent Hayward in April and May would go a long way in helping the Celtics make up any homecourt advantage they might lack.

Maybe it’s not fair to expect that sort of consistency from Hayward until next season, but it’s clear from his frustration that he, more than anyone, wants to find it sooner.

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