Jayson Tatum pays teammates a visit at team hotel in New York

NEW YORK — Injured Celtics star Jayson Tatum paid a visit at the team hotel on Thursday, his teammates said Friday at the morning shootaround ahead of Game 6 against the Knicks.

Tatum underwent surgery to repair a ruptured Achilles’ tendon on Tuesday. His mood during the visit was as good as it could have been under the circumstances, Payton Pritchard said.

“It was really good seeing him, obviously he’s out of surgery,” Pritchard said. “He seemed like he was in really good spirits and stuff.”

“Honestly, he’s probably about to be stir crazy for a while now, but it was just good when you see one of your brothers, your teammates, go through a situation like that and you just want to be there to comfort him with anything he needs.”

While the Celtics had a win-or-go home showdown ahead of them, that didn’t come up much during Tatum’s visit. The Celtics won by 25 points at TD Garden Wednesday night without Tatum. A Game 6 victory would force Game 7 in Boston on Monday night.

“We didn’t talk about basketball at all,” Pritchard said. ”That stuff is bigger than basketball now. It’s just seeing how he is as a person, how he’s dealing with stuff. The basketball side, we’ll handle that. Just want to check in as a friend.”

The Celtics put together their highest-scoring performance of the playoffs in the 127-102 Game 5 victory. They played at a faster pace, Pritchard said. They seemed to be able to move the ball more efficiently than during previous games in the series.

“It’s not necessarily the case,” Pritchard said. ”Jayson is an unbelievable player. He’s a great player that can attack isolations and matchups.

“When you have a stud like that, you take advantage of that. We don’t have that anymore, so now we need to transition into more pace, more off-ball, more stuff like that. It doesn’t mean some of us aren’t able of attacking, it’s just that JT is at a different level with that.”

Pritchard described the team’s mind-set as being “ready for war.” Hauser said the team is focused on bringing the series back to Boston.

“It sucks to see someone like that go down who doesn’t deserve it, but he wouldn’t want anything more than us to just keep winning,” Hauser said. ”We saw him yesterday, and he seems to be in good spirits. We’re definitely thinking about him and trying to get some wins for him.”