Since the turn of the calendar year to 2022, the Boston Celtics have proven to be one of, if not the hottest team in the entire association.
Boasting an 18-7 record since January 2nd, and a 35-26 overall record on the year the C’s are playing like one of the top teams in the tightly contested Eastern Conference.
Of course, the driving forces behind this surge have been the team’s core players in Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Robert Williams, and Marcus Smart who, no matter which of the latter two find themselves serving as the tertiary piece alongside the Jays on a given night, formulate the league’s best Big-3.
Because of this, fans of the organization should be truly exuberant when thinking about the current makeup of this ball club, especially when considering Heavy.com’s recent reports stating that things were once on the brink of looking a whole lot different if a certain former franchise cornerstone would have stayed put.
Per Senior NBA Columnist, Steve Bulpett, the once upon a time Boston Celtics centerpiece, Kyrie Irving, had a plan to not only re-up with the C’s past his contract expiration (which came during the summer of 2019) but, also, to build a top-flight tandem in Eastern Massachusetts consisting of himself and superstar big man, Anthony Davis.
According to Bulpett’s sources, the star point guard was getting the wheels in motion to bring the, then, 25-year-old to Beantown:
"““Oh, Kyrie was definitely on AD,” a Pelicans source told Heavy.com."
"“It was looking like Anthony Davis was going to go to Boston with Kyrie there for a stretch. That’s what Kyrie wanted,” a league executive told Heavy."
Ultimately, however, there seemed to be somewhat of a ‘falling out’ between Irving and Davis because, as another source put it, “obviously Kyrie had a falling out with Boston at some point there.”
The hypothetical idea of Davis being traded to the Boston Celtics should be nothing new for fans, as such talks were highlighted within the rumor mill during the tail-end of Tatum’s rookie season and have even been broached as recently as this year.
Based on the timeline Bulpett’s piece is discussing, such a trade would have likely gone on to cost the shamrocks both of the Jays along with draft capital on top of them which, even then, was viewed as too much by the team’s front office.
Clearly the Celtics made out just fine with having not paired these two players together, for Irving’s volatility and Davis’s health ailments have only proven to have gotten worse with time.
With this in mind, we at HH feel as though it’s safe to say that fans and the franchise as a whole are more than content with how things played out for, at the end of the day, the C’s still wound up rostering two top-tier players in the entire league in Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.
While sometimes it’s fun to look back and think about “what could have been”, in this specific scenario, perhaps it’s best not to and, in turn, just appreciate what we have in front of us.
This was the better outcome, anyway.