Kyrie Irving’s Brooklyn Nets will visit the TD Garden in Boston for the first time this season on Wednesday night, but the former Celtics star will not be in the lineup, as he continues to recover from a shoulder injury.
The Celtics lost both Irving and Al Horford to free agency in the offseason and added All-Star Kemba Walker, but the new-look Celtics are off to a fantastic start with a 12-4 record. According to Celtics players, there’s a completely different vibe in the locker room this season, and with reports about Irving’s “mood swings” in Brooklyn circulating early in the year, it’s been easy for some Celtics fans to blame Irving for the team’s lost season a year ago.
Marcus Smart broke down what went wrong with the 2018-19 Celtics in an interview with The Athletic, and said the team learned valuable lessons from the disappointing year. Smart says he and his teammates openly talk about their issues with one another, something that didn’t always happen last season. Smart also defended Irving, who Smart says shouldered all of the pressure heaped on the team by the media, all while dealing with the loss of his grandfather early in the season. Smart says the Celtics didn’t know how Irving would react to any given situation, but reasoned that his moodiness was a natural “defense mechanism.”
Via The Athletic:
[Irving’s] mood grew dark enough at times behind the scenes to impact several layers of the organization. He would go through stretches, sources said, where he just shut off. One assistant coach said he once rode about 30 or 40 flights on an elevator with Irving — and the guard did not say a single word. By February, the organization had realized how much Irving’s mindset could impact the rest of the team.
“It’s not that we didn’t know how to act (around him),” Smart said. “It’s that we didn’t know how he was going to act. We didn’t know what his moods were and we didn’t know what Kyrie was going through. And that made it tough on us because if somebody’s going through something in their life and you don’t really know what it is, it’s kind of hard to see what’s wrong with him, it’s kind of hard to (provide) some help. It’s not against Kyrie, it’s just a defense mechanism as a human being you have. And he wasn’t here long enough to really be able to open up the way he probably wanted to, and it probably got to him a little bit.”
