Utah Jazz

Jazz's Gordon Hayward calls surgery 'a blessing and a curse'

Published Aug. 11, 2015 4:54 p.m. ET

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NBA bloggers across the Internet, beware: Utah Jazz wing Gordon Hayward is spinning his own digital yarns and interviewing himself on his personal blog, where he talked about how his summer is going, his recovery from offseason heel surgery and how much he enjoys the current Jazz coaching staff.

Utah fans will be happy to know that Hayward says he's coming back just fine from the minor procedure he had done on his heel after the season ended. In fact, he called the surgery "kind of a blessing and a curse." It frustrated Hayward that he couldn't put any weight on his foot for a few weeks, but the recovery period allowed him to focus on improving his ball-handling and becoming a better all-around player.

"I was able to do more ball handling drills that didn’t involve moving my lower body that much. Not spinning and dunking or anything like that, but little movements with my ball handling. My ball handling improved a lot despite the fact that I really wasn’t able to move.

"In the gym, I focused on doing lifts and exercises that didn’t include that part of my body, so it was a lot more upper body lifting initially, and I got a lot stronger through that. And through the rehab after the surgery, I was able to become way more flexible in my foot and ankle. So by the time I was done rehabbing it, I wasn’t just as good as I used to be — I was better and more flexible. So I think having that injury to overcome this offseason has been a good thing for me."

Of course, even when Hayward is healthy, his goal is to improve every aspect of his game. Player development is kind of the way things go in Utah, and Hayward credits the Jazz coaching staff for instilling that philosophy. He said that assistant Johnnie Bryant and head coach Quin Snyder are always piping up with little ideas during the offseason, and that he talks to Snyder about once a week. "He’s somebody I can talk to man to man, as well as being my coach. That’s important for building our relationship moving forward," Hayward writes.

From the sound of it, Hayward is vouching for Snyder as the man to lead the Jazz back to the promised land of the playoffs. And if Hayward is healthy, that might happen as soon as this season.

(h/t Gordon Hayward 20.com)

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