LAS VEGAS — The Thomas & Mack Center was home to one of the most iconic rivalries in sports on Thursday night: Boston Celtics vs. Los Angeles Lakers. Whether it’s Game 7 of the NBA Finals, a regular-season affair, or two randomly-assigned teams in a local rec league, if those two monikers are squaring off, it matters.
Summer League certainly wasn’t going to break that distinction, especially not in Walsh’s eyes.
With 5:00 remaining in the fourth quarter, the Celtics up by 12 points, Walsh found himself all alone. Kenneth Lofton Jr. heaved a half-court inbound pass Tom Brady himself would be proud of, setting Walsh up for a ferocious windmill dunk.
“I wanted to beat the Lakers bad,” Walsh said of the moment. “I wanted to make a statement, real bad. So I decided to put some icing on the cake.”
Said icing wasn’t enough to halt the crowd’s gawking when Bronny James nailed a three on the ensuing Lakers possession, but it was enough to help Boston secure a win.
For Walsh, that’s all that mattered. He even took some time to do some reporting of his own on the victory.
“Jordan is not a good journalist,” Miles Norris said as Walsh held up a phone in the back of his post-game media scrum. “He should stick to basketball. He's a great basketball player. I don't know about being a journalist.”
Walsh’s dunk, on the other hand, Norris was on board with.
“I like the windmill,” he said. “Yeah, he should stick to basketball. Put the phone down. Jordan, I'm trying to be athletic like Jordan. It's good to see.”
A smile inched across Walsh’s face as Norris poked fun at him. It was fun. Everyone laughed and enjoyed the moment. That’s who Walsh is. From showing off his katanas on a livestream to getting movie assignments from Al Horford, Walsh has been a source of humor off the court. A comedic sense of calm.
On the court, Walsh is anything but calm.
Erik Stevenson started it. The former West Virginia guard has been a nuisance for nearly his entire basketball career, including now, as he suits up for the Miami Heat’s Summer League squad. It’s been a sticking point in his personality. Walsh found that out the hard way on Monday afternoon.
As the Celtics wing drove to the basket in transition, Stevenson shouldered him as he was taking off. There was no play on the ball. No effort to swipe down on the play. It was a clear-cut foul. Walsh wasn’t put in any danger, but he wasn’t thrilled.
He immediately stormed over to Stevenson and walked into him, earning himself a hefty one-arm shove in response. Both players received offsetting techs.
Though Walsh’s short-term memory cut that part out of the story.
He was ejected seven seconds of game time later.
As Walsh picked up Pelle Larsson above half-court on the following possession. Once the Heat guard slipped past him by a hair, he dished out a small shove that sent Larsson into the front row—right into the laps of Brad Stevens, Mike Zarren, and Bill Chisholm, among other high-ranking Celtics brass.
Larsson immediately stood back up, walked over to Walsh, and the two players shoved each other. Once again, double techs were issued, but for Walsh, this met the two-strikes-and-you're-out policy. His game was over.
“I mean, dumb decision,” Walsh said of the incident. “Lowkey kind of forgot I got the first tech. And I also remember that don't nobody really hit nobody in the NBA, so I really didn't have no reason to attack him. But I thought that it was dumb at the end of the day. I feel like that was a rookie mistake. It was immature of me to do. Can't let it happen again.”
Hindsight is 20/20. Looking back at the incident that had just unfolded, Walsh had regrets. But in that moment, he was on top of the world.
“I mean, honestly, I had no idea what was going on, to be completely honest,” Baylor Scheierman said with a smile, looking back on the event. “But I mean, good for him, I guess.”
As soon as he and Larsson got in a shoving match, Walsh screamed.
“Woooo.”
All of Cox Pavilion heard it. Stevens heard it from three feet away as he was sitting courtside. Zarren heard it. Chisholm heard it. And another familiar face heard it, too.
“Yeah, [Joe Mazzulla] told me he loved it,” Walsh said as a smirk crept across his face. “As soon as I got ejected and I got to the locker room, I checked my phone, and he was texting me. He was like, 'I love this out of you.' So, I don't know, take that for what it is. But Joe was hyped for sure.”
Even though it was mere seconds later, Walsh had no recollection of his bout with Stevenson. Intensity flooded his brain.
That’s how it works whenever Walsh steps onto the court. He wants to win, he wants to, play his game, and he wants to annoy everybody on the opposing team as much as possible.
“I feel like I'm trying to get under people's skin,” Walsh said. “I'm trying to get them confused, throw them off their rhythm. Ended up happening to me. But I want to disrupt everybody. So, I want to take you out your rhythm. I want to take you out your plays, your sets. I want to speed you up. But yeah, that was the original goal.”
The plan backfired against Miami. It emerged in the wrong form.
But between the windmill and his other antics, Walsh managed to course correct a few nights later.
Walsh was feeling himself against the Lakers. With 3:46 remaining in the game, a nine-point lead was helping the Celtics hang on against LA. Lofton threaded a pass between the teeth of the defense to a cutting Scheierman, who nearly lost the ball out of bounds.
He gathered himself, dribbled the ball to the corner next to Boston’s bench, and handed it off to Walsh. The 21-year-old rose up and fired from beyond the arc.
As the ball floated in the air, a voice rung out throughout Thomas & Mack.
“Hell no” it yelled.
The shot cashed, and Walsh yelled back.
“I said, 'Hold that,’” Walsh recalled.
Walsh skipped back into defensive position, fully enthralled in the vigor of the game. He finished the night with 17 points, six rebounds, two steals, one windmill dunk, and one ‘Hold that.’
And the target of said ‘Hold that’ was a face all too familiar.
“DJ Steward said that,” Walsh said. “Yeah, from Maine. My old teammate. That's crazy he'd do me like that.”
But, not so secretly, Walsh loved it. He loves talking trash. He loves going back and forth. He loves that little extra oomph on the basketball court that turns the heat up just enough. “I'll be talking,” he said. “I'll be talking crazy.”
Any opportunity he gets to be an irritant on the court, he takes. Sometimes, this takes the form of a little extra pushing and shoving. Other times, it’s just words. But Walsh is versatile in the game of being a pest.
“Everything is situational, you know what I'm saying?” Walsh said, thinking of his favorite type of trash talk. “If I hit a three, I'm saying, 'Hold that.' If I dunk on somebody, I might just stare at them and just like, lick my lips or something.”
If he needs to, he’ll be the instigator. But usually, he’s not the one inciting the issues. At least, not in his mind.
“It depends on how I'm feeling,” Walsh said. “Like, if I'm feeling good and it's rolling, I'm starting it. But, like, usually I'm not starting it. But if somebody says anything to me, then it's like, I'm giving them all I got.”
Summer League has been Walsh’s canvas for being a menace. Against the Memphis Grizzlies, he stood over the ball out of bounds, praying for GG Jackson to push him away and earn himself a tech. “I was kind of just baiting,” Walsh said. “Just baiting for him to do something. Push me, hit me, do something.”
That same possession, he poked the ball away from Memphis in front of the Celtics’ bench, fueling a barking fit. “I was in full bark mode right there,” he said. “I was barking.”
And the whole team joined in.
“Everybody [was barking back],” Walsh said. “We were all kind of just barking at each other. And I was like, 'Oh yeah, give me that.' And then we'll bark.”
Stevenson and Larsson got the brunt of it against Miami. Steward brought it upon himself against LA. But opponents aren’t the sole targets of Walsh’s endeavors.
“In practice, JD [Davison], for sure,” Walsh said of his favorite person to trash-talk. “I love talking trash to JD. All the time. Talk trash to JD. Talk a lot of trash to JB [Jaylen Brown], too. For sure.”
There was nowhere to go but up in Vegas. Last summer, Walsh failed. He failed to live up to his own expectations. He failed on the court. But perhaps most disappointingly, he failed in his approach.
"It's no secret, the first game for me was terrible," Walsh said. "But I felt like my focus was at the wrong thing. I feel like I should have focused more on playing how I would play if [Jayson] Tatum was now on the floor. I feel like I was thinking (that) I was the only guy on the floor, not in a selfish way, but as a way of like, 'I want to get my shots' and stuff like that, and I feel like I put too much on making shots."
Fast forward a year later, Walsh in his third Summer League, and everything shifted. He came out firing against the Grizzlies, pouring in a game-high 17 points in a Celtics win.
A poor shooting performance against the Knicks was quickly erased by a 13-point explosion against the Heat, though it was cut short by his second-quarter ejection.
That only pushed him harder.
“Super motivated,” Walsh said of his mindset after the ejection. “And I was even more motivated when we came out and they [the Lakers] were hitting me, pushing me, all types of dirty stuff, and I was just like, 'Stay cool, calm. Let's win this game, and we can be happy after.”
For all the screaming, shoving, and trash talk Walsh has dished out in Vegas this year, he’s backed it up with a wave of improvement. After last summer, concerns began to rumble. But this year has been a complete change of pace.
“He's grown in a lot of different areas,” Scheierman said of Walsh. “I think, obviously, the older you are, the more comfortable you become, and obviously, this Summer League, I think he's done a great job of just balancing when to be aggressive and when to kind of just chill out. And he's playing great, so.”
Gone are the days of Walsh forcing the issue. If the chance to create falls at his feet, he takes it, driving to the paint with poise and making a play for the Celtics. If a play role required him to stand at the three-point line, he would stay there. A still frame, waiting for the ball to swing his way.
“I'm working on all parts of my game, obviously,” Walsh said. “But I think, when it comes to Summer League, it's all about, ‘What can you do in the moment to help us win?’ And in the moment, I was getting a couple plays called for me, where I had to create, or was just in the flow of offense. It was like, I had to create. And so I just took every moment like that with as much confidence as I could. Determination to just get a bucket.”
Next year’s Celtics could host a world of opportunities. Injuries, trades, and second-apron fallout induced a cataclysm, tearing apart the roster Boston once knew and loved.
But hidden beneath the rubble of the championship Celtics is space that needs to be filled. Minutes that need to be replaced. And the trash-talking, role-morphing Walsh is more than ready for his time in the spotlight.