Thomas cried and covered his face with his hand. Bradley put his right arm around his teammate’s shoulder and rubbed it gently, fiddling with a basketball in his other hand.

Thomas’s coaches and teammates kept their distance because they just did not know how much space he needed. But in his moment of grief, while Thomas sat alone on the bench hours before tipoff, Avery Bradley walked over and sat next to him.

On April 16, one day after Isaiah Thomas’s 22-year-old sister, Chyna, was killed in a car crash, the Boston Celtics point guard was trying to summon the strength to play in Game 1 of a playoff series against the Chicago Bulls.


On Sunday, Bradley hit a stunning last-second 3-pointer that sent the Celtics to a Game 3 win over the Cleveland Cavaliers in the conference finals and revitalized their hopes in the series. After that shot went in, he kissed his hand and pointed toward the sky, to his mother.

He could console Thomas last month because he has his own vivid memory of heartbreak. He remembers what it was like to see her hooked up to a respirator. He remembers how hollow it felt to start playing basketball again after she was gone.

And, perhaps most importantly, he remembers what it takes to heal.

Hard-working mother

Alicia Jones was a single mother of four and sometimes held three jobs at once when Bradley and his siblings were children. She did secretarial work at a social services agency and a church and took on graveyard shifts at Walmart.

In the family’s small apartment, she would sleep on a couch so her children could have the beds. If there were children in the neighborhood who were hungry, she would give them meals from her freezer.

But she did not coddle her own kids. After returning from Walmart around 4 a.m., she would inspect the dishes that her children had washed, and if she found a speck of dirt, she would wake everyone up to finish the job.


Avery Bradley and his mother Alicia Jones in 2013. Bradley family photo

Instead of cleaning the kitchen, her youngest son, Avery, preferred to play basketball using the trash cans as goals, scuffing up the floor with his sneakers and driving his mother mad. The sport became his primary focus, and he turned into one of the top high school basketball prospects in the nation. Alicia made it to his games despite her schedule, and everyone knew when she was there.

“She was the loud mom in the crowd, always screaming the whole time,” Bradley recalls, smiling. “That was definitely her.”

A young love

Bradley accepted a scholarship to the University of Texas. When he was a freshman, he saw a beautiful young woman pop up on his friend Lavelt Page’s Facebook profile.

“She’s not real,” Bradley told Page. “There’s no way she’s real.”

Bradley was smitten. He and Ashley Archbald started talking, and talking turned into flirting, and flirting turned into Skype video conversations that went deep into the night.

Bradley, who was 19 at the time, never told her he was an NBA prospect. But since he was younger than she, he did tell her he was 21. They stayed in contact for almost a year before finally meeting. Then Ashley moved to New York to pursue a career in swimwear design and Bradley was drafted in the first round by the Celtics, and he told her their serendipitous proximity was a sign.


After they started dating, Bradley invited Archbald on a family trip to St. Martin. She and Bradley’s mother connected instantly. Jones pulled her aside and said how glad she was to have her there, how it was the first time Bradley had ever introduced a girlfriend to his family.

Archbald loved seeing Bradley and his mother interact. When Bradley was upset or passionate about something, Jones would just sit quietly until he finished. Then Bradley would inevitably pause and ask his mother what she thought.

“Now that’s what I do with him,” Archbald said with a chuckle. “I learned by watching his mom.”

Ashley Archbald and Avery Bradley on their wedding day in 2015. bradley family photo

In early September 2013, Avery and Ashley were returning to Boston for the start of the NBA season after spending the summer in Tacoma. Archbald was eight months pregnant with their first child, and in about a week Jones was going to move to Boston to help them care for him.

As they left Jones’s house in Washington, she stood outside and waved. Archbald got out of the car to give her another hug. She was calling Jones “Mom” then, even though she and Bradley were not yet married.

Bradley waved from the driver’s seat.

“Babe, go give your mom a hug,” Archbald told him.

“She’s coming next week,” Bradley said.

“Please, go back and give her a hug.”

So Bradley got out and gave his mother a hug.

“We’ll see you soon, ma,” he said.


‘She’s gone’

Later that week, Bradley and Archbald were driving home to Boston after a quick business meeting in New York when Bradley’s brother, Tim, called. The two had been fighting, and Bradley was tired, so he ignored it.

Then Tim called again before finally sending a text message.

“Call me back right now. It’s Mom.”

Alicia Jones, who was still youthful and vibrant and doing zumba at 46, had suffered a massive stroke.

Bradley sped up I-95 in silence. Archbald put her hand on his shoulder and then pulled it away — because what if he didn’t want a hand on his shoulder right then?

“I was just thinking, ‘What do I do? What do I say to him?’ ” she said. “It was the longest drive.”

Bradley was on the first flight to Seattle the next morning.

“When I got home,” he said, “my mom was mostly gone.”

Bradley stayed at the hospital for four days as others came and went. One of his friends called Archbald and said they were worried because Bradley was not eating or sleeping or talking.

Every night he would call Ashley on Skype — just as he did during their courtship — and they would sit in silence, sometimes for hours, as Jones’s respirator beeped in the background. Bradley did not want to talk, but he needed to know his fiancée was there. All he could do was text, “I love you.”

After four harrowing and draining days, Bradley’s family convinced him to leave the hospital and get some sleep. He called Archbald on Skype, put his phone by his side, and dozed off at a family member’s home.


When Archbald fell asleep, she had a crystal-clear dream in which Bradley’s mother came into the room carrying a baby. She said the boy’s name was Liam.

“She just said, ‘I have to give him to you now,’ ” Archbald recalled. “I said, ‘What do you mean, Mom?’ She said she had to go, and I asked her where she was going. And then she just put the baby in my arms, and I remember thinking, ‘How do I hold a baby?’ Then she just walked out.”

Archbald isn’t sure if it was part of the dream or not, but she woke up to the sound of a door shutting. Bradley, who was still on the Skype call they’d fallen asleep to, was now awake on the other end in Tacoma. He said he had to go back to the hospital, because his mother’s condition had worsened. He called Archbald a few hours later.

“She’s gone,” he said.

The bliss of birth

When Bradley returned to Boston on Sept. 23 following his mother’s funeral, he was broken.

“He felt like he had nothing to live for,” said Page, his best friend. “His mom was his rock, his backbone.”

“Rock bottom,” Bradley said. “I wasn’t eating. I was barely drinking. All I did was cry. My wife couldn’t even get me to talk. And I came home and all I was thinking was, ‘Now I’ve got to go to work after all this?’ ”

The Celtics were preparing to open training camp, and Bradley would face insignificant questions about playing time and contract extensions and 3-pointers. He landed at Logan Airport after a redeye flight and called Archbald at 7:59 a.m. to tell her he was there.

She didn’t know how she would console him. A few minutes later, she sat up in bed, and her water broke. She immediately called Bradley back.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“I’m sure.”

“Ashley, please be sure, because that’s the only happiness I’d have in my life right now,” he said. “I’m coming home right now.”

Archbald sat in the front seat during the car ride to the hospital, and Bradley could feel the baby moving as he touched her stomach.

After a 24-hour labor, the couple’s baby boy was born at 8:13 a.m. on Sept. 24. During the delivery, Bradley trembled and tears streamed down his face. He was devastated and glowing and heartbroken and blessed all at once.

Avery Bradley with his newborn son Avery Bradley III, or "Liam.” bradley family photo

“He would not let that baby out of his sight,” Archbald said. “The nurses said they had to clean him up and give him a bath, and Avery was like, ‘I’ll bathe him.’ So he gave him his first bath.”

For weeks, Bradley would sit in a rocking chair at home and cradle the boy in his arms until he fell asleep. The baby was officially Avery Bradley III, but they would call him Liam, the name mentioned by Bradley’s mother in the dream.

About a year later, the couple was talking about that dream and they found it somewhat funny that of all the names in the world, Liam was the one that had come up. So they researched the meaning of the name. There were many, but one froze them: “I will save my father.”

Striving for more

Every time Bradley makes a 3-pointer, he kisses his right hand and points toward the sky for his mother. He still thinks about her every day.

Alicia Jones was so proud of her youngest son. She’d had her first child at 15, and only one of Avery’s siblings had graduated from high school. And now here was her baby boy off to college, and then off to the NBA, and then about to become a father.

“I think she was happy for me,” Bradley says. “Most importantly, it wasn’t the basketball player I was becoming; it was the person I was becoming.”

He wishes his mother could see him care for his own family. The couple has two boys, and a baby girl is due in August. They will name her Alicia-Marie, mixing the first name of Bradley’s mother with the middle name of Archbald’s.

One-year-old Ashton has a countenance and mannerisms that match the grandmother he never met.

Ashton and Liam Bradley. bradley family photo

Liam, now 3, is just old enough to understand that his father is an NBA star. He loves going to Celtics games in his jersey, and if his father does not acknowledge him before tipoff, he gets frustrated. At the family’s Watertown home, Liam will run through the dining room as if he is the one being introduced in Boston’s starting lineup. When he pretends to be his father, he gives a serious, focused glare.

“Papa do that,” he’ll tell anyone who will listen. “Papa don’t smile.”

Bradley’s smiles come out at home. His preference to stay out of the spotlight and off of social media and away from the NBA nightlife sometimes confuses others. But that is not his world.

At home, he will play on the floor with his children, or put on music and dance with his mother-in-law, or gather everyone in the living room to watch a documentary. When they are back at their offseason house in Austin, Texas, he will excitedly get everyone into the car for long drives to nowhere.

Bradley, who is being asked to shoulder an even larger role than normal now that Thomas is out for the season with a hip injury, is very aware that his place in the sports world will be temporary. The seventh-year veteran knows he will be remembered for big moments, like his game-winning 3-pointer Sunday. But he also sees no reason to wait until his career is over to make an impact elsewhere.

Liam Bradley and father Avery Bradley hooked up before a playoff game at TD Garden. Brian Babineau/boston celtics

He recently watched a film about putrid living conditions in Haiti and vowed to go there soon to help. He puts on charity basketball camps for the less fortunate in Grenada and Trinidad. He has taken part in video conferences with US soldiers stationed overseas.

“The way Avery views life is that the basketball game is only two hours,” his wife said. “Then what? What did you do to make anyone’s life better?”

It’s a view that he picked up from his mother. And even though she is gone now, Bradley’s memories of her and the constant reminders of her make it seem as if she never left.

“She still drives me to want to be a better father,” he said, “a better husband, a better basketball player, a better person.”

Adam Himmelsbach can be reached at adam.himmelsbach@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @adamhimmelsbach.