“Nobody was really talking about us, you know?”
KEMBA WALKER is seated in the Optum Lounge of the Auerbach Center, where the Boston Celtics practice, thinking back on this summer. When he was in China for the 2019 FIBA World Cup, along with Marcus Smart, Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum, the four of them discussed the doubt placed on their team at home.
“Granted, they lost a few guys who made this team go,” Walker continues, “but I still felt like we would be pretty good just because of the talent that I knew we had and how much the young guys wanted it. Guys like Smart, JB and JT, I could tell how much they wanted to become better players and how disappointed they were about last year. Those kinds of things played a part in how I felt like we were going to be this season.”
Of course, last season informed a lot of the early projections. The Cs were favorites to come out of the East in ’18-19 but didn’t live up to expectations, finishing as the No. 4 seed and getting bounced in the second round of the playoffs. That fact, combined with key losses in free agency, bred skepticism. But skepticism is OK. In many ways, it’s welcomed.
There’s less pressure in being the underdog. And once the wounds of a disheartening year began to heal, those remaining could find the positives in it. Sometimes, there have to be lows to be highs. The group had to learn from their mistakes. They used failure and doubt as further motivation, and they set out to prove everyone wrong.
“We were just talking about what we wanted to do this season, how we wanted to come out and really shut people up,” Smart recalls of those conversations in China. “We just knew everybody was going to doubt us. So for us, it was just coming out and being able to show what we were capable of.”
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