For the First Time in Forever, Isaiah Thomas Looks Like Himself

An NBA MVP candidate kicked to the curb, a savage hip surgery and, last weekend, an eye-opening first step toward a comeback. @HowardBeck checks in on @isaiahthomas, who reminds us: “I've beat the odds before” https://t.co/LYLD6Npisd

— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) February 25, 2021

In the space of 35 days last winter, Isaiah Thomas was traded by a team that didn’t need him, released by a team that didn’t want him and then, like the rest of the NBA and the world, nudged into involuntary hibernation.

Suddenly there were no games to prepare for, no practices to attend, not even the hope of a phone call from some GM desperate for a savvy veteran to bolster his bench. The calendar was a bleak, empty canvas, leaving Thomas to confront two nagging sensations: the uncertainty of his career, and the constant, debilitating pain in his right hip.

Even for Thomas, whose greatest skill was his ability to defy odds—the 5′ 9″ guard who dominated a game of giants, the last pick of the draft who became an All-Star—this was a daunting, distressing moment. There was no telling when NBA games might return, or whether any team would come calling once that happened. “The toughest time,” Thomas says today, “because I didn’t know what would be next.”

As it happens the nothingness was exactly what he needed. With no games to play and no teams to try out for, Thomas did last May what he should have done three years earlier: He flew to New York, lay down on an operating table and let surgeons repair his fraying hip. There, in the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the most tenuous stage of his professional life, Thomas took the step that might have saved his career. At least that’s the hope.