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Marcus Smart On What Went Wrong With Kyrie And The Celtics

After the 2017-2018 NBA season, everyone thought that the Boston Celtic will develop into a serious contender for years to come.

These young Celtics had been one of the biggest success stories of that season.

A young team that lost both their All-Stars, Gordon Hayward and Kyrie Irving, who both underwent season-ending surgeries, made the Conference Finals. Boston’s young core (Tatum, Brown, Rozier) played brilliantly and made the fans almost forget about Irving and Hayward.

Then, this past season, with the two stars healthy and playing again, everyone expected the Celtics to be the East’s top dog and the start of them being a contender for many years. But in reality, the team was struggling all year long.

The team never managed to build a chemistry and act like an actual team, leading to Kyrie Irving eventually leaving town. Kyrie’s former teammate, Marcus Smart now opened up about what happened with Irving and the Celtics and why it was tough for the team:

“It’s not that we didn’t know how to act [around him]. 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.”