Jaden Springer makes Celtics debut in Bulls win after surprise trade

Jaden Springer made his Celtics debut on Thursday night after missing his first week of action with his new team due to an ankle injury. Springer saw two minutes of action during the fourth quarter of the Celtics’ 129-112 victory over the Bulls, missing his lone 3-point attempt in the win. He had been dealing with a right ankle impingement suffered during his final game in Philadelphia before the trade.

“Really just about getting my foot back right,” Springer told reporters Thursday about his recovery process. “Get comfortable playing, getting up and down the court. Played a little bit. That’s about it. Everything was feeling good”

The Celtics gave up a second round pick for Springer in the moments before the trade deadline, allowing Boston to land the 6-foot-4 guard from the division rival 76ers. Springer compared his former team’s system under Nick Nurse to his new squad.

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“I feel like there’s more read and react,” Springer said. “You going out there playing based off each other, playing based off your teammates. So you’re just reading what everybody else is doing. It’s not really a set, ‘we have to do this, we have to do that.’ So just going out there and hooping and playing basketball.”

Springer received some major minutes in Philadelphia as the team dealt with major injury woes but he will have a longer wait for meaningful chances in Boston with the team fully healthy and set on the wing. However, Springer’s experience matching up defensively against some top offensive talent in Luka Doncic and Stephen Curry with the Sixers in recent weeks was useful for the 21-year-old.

“I mean, yeah, being able to play to play against those guys, that was pretty cool,” Springer said. “Being able to have that matchup. Being able to come here, it was great. That was all good news for me. I’m feeling good.”

Springer will likely have some extra motivation with his new team after a blunt assessment of his ability from his former GM Daryl Morey in Philadelphia.

“We had to look at, what are the odds Jaden Springer — who I think has a great future — helps our playoff rotation in the one, two, three-year horizon,” Morey said after the trade deadline, via Sam DiGiovanni. “And what are the odds a second-round pick helps us? And we thought the second-round pick helped us more. And that’s just the reality, it allows us to maybe get a veteran at next year’s deadline, things like that.

“We did it. It sucks. Jaden’s going to be really good, I think. I think his timetable is a little pushed out, though. Our evaluation was that his timetable to help a playoff team is farther than what the second-round pick can do for us.”

That assessment stands in contrast to how the Celtics and Brad Stevens view the former first round pick, with high hopes for his development in the present and the future.

“We’ve tracked his development pretty closely over the years,” Brad Stevens said earlier this month. “We liked him in the draft a few years ago. He’s still a puppy. … So we were already like, ‘Woah, that looks like strides.’ The other thing that everybody that is nuts like us watches all the G-League stuff. He was unbelievable in the G-League playoffs last year. He’s done a lot of good things against us when he’s been up in Maine. We’ve seen him live several times up there. He’s a guy we’ve been tracking for a while.”