Jae Crowder, it seems, isn’t thrilled about the Boston Celtics’ face-to-face meeting with Kevin Durant.
And he has a point.
From Mass Live’s Tom Westerholm:
“We were the only team in the NBA to beat both (Cleveland and Golden State) on their home court — the only team in the NBA, the Boston Celtics,” Crowder said. “We told him that. We played him clips from both games and told him basically the scouting report of how we guarded Steph (Curry) and Klay (Thompson) — our entire game plan, basically. That’s what made me mad. We (expletive) told him everything we do to beat these guys, and we beat them, and he went and joined them. I mean, that’s part of the process, but I did not think he would go to those two teams … I felt like afterward, I was talking to Isaiah, like maybe after you sit back, you shouldn’t have told him everything, but who the (expletive) thought he was going to Golden State, realistically? It was like a slap in the face for us, basically.”
This is simultaneously hysterical and accurate. Like, what else were the Celtics supposed to do? They were one of the few NBA teams to even land a face-to-face sit-down with Durant. They needed to sell themselves over his incumbent Oklahoma City Thunder, not to mention the San Antonio Spurs and Golden State Warriors.
So of course they would need to point out that they played the Cleveland Cavaliers and Warriors tightly the entire season. It was part of their appeal. And then, from a basketball perspective, they would need to show Durant that he would only advance their strategy. So, yet again, of course they divulged some of their trade secrets. They arguably needed to, in order for him to understand that he was the missing piece.
This brings about the larger issue of what happens in other free-agent meetings. Surely the Celtics aren’t the first team to voluntarily reveal some of their on-court game plans. This is a dilemma other squads have most definitely had in the past.
But this particular situation is unique, insofar as the Celtics tried to prop themselves up at the expense of a 73-win team that Durant would go on to join. That most definitely hasn’t happened before.
For Crowder’s sake, here’s hoping the Celtics find new ways to impede the Warriors before he loses any more sleep.
