They often met in the gym to talk, one-on-one. There didn’t have to be anything wrong for Danny Ainge and Rajon Rondo to have their conversations. No one talked with Rondo, advocated for him, or interpreted his actions like Ainge.
He took the time to see things from Rondo’s perspective when others might stop at his cockiness or brooding. He’d gotten beyond that veneer long ago and learned how passionate Rondo was about winning and how—despite his reputation—he’d be self-critical after losses, sometimes too much.
And that was the problem. Not many people saw or knew that Rondo. A whole team had seen something else in a meeting room, where the mildest criticism of his play led him to throw a tantrum—and a water bottle. Ainge was one of the rare people who could acknowledge Rondo’s immaturity and aloofness and love him anyway.
But Ainge didn’t love this conversation that they had to have. He was disappointed, and he wanted Rondo to know it.
“You need to apologize to your team and apologize to Doc,” Ainge said.
“I’ll apologize to the team, but I won’t apologize to Doc.”
He thought Rivers was singling him out for the performances in Miami. Where Rivers had seen constructive criticism, Rondo saw an unfair ambush, an attack.
“Well, you’re going to have a tarnished reputation for the rest of your career, because I’m going to have to suspend you. If you don’t apologize to the team and Doc, you’ll have a stain on your career that goes against the player I know you to be, and I know you don’t want that.”
Ainge clearly saw that Rondo didn’t agree with him. At least not in the moment. But one thing he knew he could get from Ainge was full and fair criticism of any basketball-related incident. The general manager had seen everything in his career. Ainge didn’t like what Rondo had done during the film session, but he also didn’t think it cracked the top ten of all the authority-challenging things he’d witnessed on good teams. He believed these things needed to be handled, but he was also against overreactions. He continued.
“It’s a simple thing to do, and you should actually want to apologize. You should feel remorse for how you acted, because whether you were right or wrong, it’s the wrong way to behave under any circumstances.
“You could have addressed Doc one-on-one. You could have come to my office. You could have dealt with it in a lot of different ways. But that was the wrong way to deal with it. And you have to feel sorry for that. That was a terrible mistake.”
This was no sudden transformative moment. It was going to take some time for Rondo to come around. Ainge had made his points, though, and he was hopeful that they would sink in before the Heat series was over. He wasn’t going to put him back out there without an apology, because then Ainge would have a problem on his hands with Rivers, as it would send a horrible message to the entire team.
There was combustion in the New England air, for sure, but tensions and contradictions enveloped the entire NBA, as well.
Rondo’s story was a fraction of a larger league issue. In both cases, discomfort and grievances had been building for years, and eruption—before resolution—was inevitable.
For Rondo, the basketball profile didn’t match his behavior. He was a generous and creative on-court helper, someone who would go through people, and seemingly the laws of physics, to get the ball to a teammate. He’d recently rewritten the team’s record books with the two best assist seasons in Celtics history. His game play suggested community; his off-court approach accelerated conflict.
The Celtics were going to have more time to think about that than they wanted. Rondo apologized to the team and Rivers, paid for a new TV, and played against Miami. The Heat ended their season in five games and then did the same thing to Tom Thibodeau’s Chicago Bulls. That meant millions of people, either in the NBA or devoted fans of it, could be united as they rooted against Miami in the NBA Finals.
It was hard to keep up with the instant allies that had been produced, all aligned because they hated The Decision and the Heat. From the wealthiest owner to the fan with the cheapest seats; from old-school Lakers to millennial Celtics; from small-market general managers to GMs with escalating payrolls (some of whom missed out on signing LeBron James), the goal was simple: Root like hell for the Dallas Mavericks to win the championship.
For all of them, a Mavericks win would restore some measure of NBA justice. It would highlight an MVP talent, Dirk Nowitzki, who spent thirteen years playing for one team. And it would show that a team could win it all without All-Stars lining up their contracts so they could present themselves as a package deal.
But the leaguewide togetherness against Miami was just a disposable script. Because after the Mavericks won the team’s first title and James disappeared in some fourth quarters, many of the allies abandoned one another to pick new and more predictable sides in a bigger fight.
Just two and a half weeks after the finals and one week after the draft, the NBA was headed toward a lockout.
League commissioner David Stern and his owners wanted control, and money, back from their players. Stern revealed that of the league’s thirty teams, twenty-two of them lost money in the previous year. To make up the losses, the league proposed a fifty-fifty split between players and ownership. In other words, they wanted the players to take a significant pay cut. Under the previous agreement, NBA players received 57 percent of basketball-related income, and owners suggested that the fifty-fifty proposal would make the league more profitable.
Business blended with bitterness with some of the midmarket owners. One of the angriest of all was Dan Gilbert, owner of the Cavaliers. He and other owners didn’t want to draft players, watch them become stars, and then have them run off to the most desired teams and cities in the league. James was from Ohio, and even he didn’t say, Hey, let’s all play in Cleveland.
If he didn’t do it, how many players would? One of the proposals was for a “supermax” contract, which would provide players even more financial incentive to stay with their original teams.
The players pushed back on a lot of it. The supermax was fine, but the players didn’t want to lose some of the salary-cap exceptions that allowed players of all talent levels to be paid. Some owners still didn’t get it, really, with great players switching teams. James had opened a portal that wouldn’t close any time soon, if ever. Players now used executive language and made executive decisions.
It was business, not personal.
Naturally, it was perceived publicly as a fight among the 1 percent: the infinitely rich versus the rich with limits. Instead of July free agency, there were negotiations. Instead of training camp in September, there were accusations lobbed from both sides. Instead of games in October and November, there were threats of a canceled season and lawsuits. Ten days into November, Stern said talks were finished and that it was about to be a “nuclear winter.”
Finally, two weeks later, the lockout was over. It lasted 149 days. The season was scheduled to start on Christmas at Madison Square Garden, with the Celtics taking on the Knicks. It didn’t leave Ainge much time to figure out which free agents to sign… or whom his starting point guard would be.
There was a fight over that as well, and once again Gilbert had something to say about it. Technically, the NBA owned the New Orleans Hornets until the team got a new owner. Their star player was Chris Paul, who was in the final year of his contract and didn’t plan to re-sign with the team at the end of the season. Paul’s availability made the market frantic. Both Los Angeles teams were interested, and so were the Celtics.
Ainge was a Rondo fan, but his affection for Paul went back further. Paul was a first-team All-NBA talent, and the Celtics were eager to get him. Ainge and Rivers told Rondo that their pursuit was not personal. They’d talked and thought out their issues from last season and were confident that nothing like that would ever happen again. But the chase was on.
Boston tried to involve other teams to fill in the gaps where the Hornets wanted assets and the Celtics didn’t have specific matches. After some furious maneuvering, twisting, and pleading, there was no deal with the Celtics.
At one point, Paul was traded to the Lakers in a move that had many screeching that the Hornets had been robbed and that Paul was gifted to the team. Stern rejected that trade, and soon Paul was on his way to LA again, this time to the Clippers.
In an e-mail to Stern, Gilbert wrote that the almost-deal to the Lakers was a “travesty.”
Ainge had a lot to consider with his own team. He was optimistic, a man of strong faith, but he was also a realist based on the totality of his NBA experience: Teams constructed like his usually didn’t win titles. Yes, maybe he had been a little too flip when he laughed and joked about the original Big Three. But no one said he had been wrong to fear holding on to Hall of Fame players too long.
Now in the chill of December, it was easy to see that this team was in a winter of its own. Allen was thirty-six; Garnett, thirty-five; Pierce, thirty-four. If they were to win a championship in 2012, it couldn’t be like 2008’s. The trio couldn’t carry the team now as it had then.
Rondo would have to continue to be a rising star, with more leadership and maturity. It wouldn’t be long before last year’s first-round pick, twenty-one-year-old Avery Bradley, would be counted on to contribute more as well. They couldn’t afford to pay Big Baby Davis the money he wanted, so they traded him to Orlando in exchange for Brandon Bass, a twenty-six-year-old forward.
What they were trying to do was tricky, close to impossible. They wanted the experience, wisdom, and pedigree of the Big Three to remain foundational, while the younger portion of the roster would provide the energy and flight.
The challenges were everywhere.
Green, acquired from the Thunder in the Kendrick Perkins trade, was a big part of the team’s plans. He was another youthful forward who could help with difficult matchups against small and power forwards. But during a routine physical, doctors noticed an enlargement of his aortic valve. He was grateful that doctors caught it when they did, and suddenly basketball was no longer a priority. He needed heart surgery and would miss the season.
The player acquired with Green, Nenad Krstic, decided that he couldn’t wait for the lockout to end and joined a team in Russia instead. With Davis gone now, four players remained from their championship team.
In their final game before the All-Star break, the Celtics traveled to Oklahoma City and saw young, elite talent in person. If anyone deserved to be bitter, it wasn’t Gilbert; it was Seattle fans. GM Sam Presti took the remnants and resources of the old Sonics and showed what can be done when you don’t settle for drafting high school centers year after year.
The strength of the Thunder was in their three A-plus draft picks from 2008–2010: Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden. The oldest of the trio, Durant, was twenty-four. Perkins was the perfect complement to them because all those players needed the ball and he didn’t. He was on a team headed to the finals, and he knew it.
His best friend, Rondo, was in trouble again. This time it was a two-game suspension for hitting an official with a basketball. Rondo didn’t like a call, and out of frustration, he flipped the ball at the official and hit him. Rivers tried to deflect some of the Rondo criticism by pointing out the ironic timing: On the day that he was serving a suspension, Rondo was named to his third straight All-Star team.
“Now we know the league doesn’t hold grudges,” Rivers cracked.
He didn’t play against the Thunder, and the Celtics lost their fifth game in a row. They went into their break with a 15–17 record.
The trading deadline was three weeks away, and Ainge had to make some decisions about the roster. The season was already strange with the lockout, even more injuries—this time to centers Jermaine O’Neal and Chris Wilcox—and more discord between Rondo and Ray Allen. It had gotten so dysfunctional between the two that Allen believed that Rondo was freezing him out of the offense. He’d run the play, look for the ball, and the ball didn’t come to him.
It was difficult to imagine Allen and Rondo finishing the season together peacefully. And for a few moments, it looked like they were going to be former teammates: Allen was being traded.
The deal was done, all set and ready to go. Allen even got a phone call from Ainge informing him of it. He was in the last year of his contract, and so was the player he was traded for, O. J. Mayo. Allen was the better player, but he was also a dozen years older than Mayo. The Celtics were acquiring a draft pick in the trade as well.
After all the rumors, they’d finally done it. They’d traded him. It was easier to count the seasons in which he didn’t hear any trade rumors. There was just one, 2007–2008. That was the year for a lot of his current and former teammates. He knew it was special then, but that word wasn’t enough to capture all that it was. Forget about the statistics; it was the most fun he’d ever had playing basketball.
He could walk away from Boston knowing that he’d given the team hard work, sacrifices to his game, and professionalism. He was better than advertised in the ’08 finals: He made half of all his shots and more than half of his 3-pointers (52 percent). He tried not to take the trade personally.
Yes, he was nearly gone. Nearly. Because just as it started to sink in for Allen, he got another call with the latest update. The deal was off.
It wasn’t until a month after the collapsed trade that the first media reports on it appeared. By that time, the Celtics had won twelve of sixteen, their best run of the season. When Rivers was asked about the failed Allen trade, he put on a performance for the ages.
“I don’t see what the big deal is,” he said. “It was a month ago. It was a scary moment for all of us. If you lose Ray, that’s a scary moment. He’s pretty good. I wouldn’t want to see Ray, Paul, or Kevin ever moved. That’s just how you are. Even if you got the best deal in the world, you’re still losing a guy you have an attachment to, and it’s pretty scary.”
His finishing kick was even better: “The guys are great. We just moved forward. That’s what I love about this team.”
But the main thing moving forward was time. The guys, particularly Rondo and Allen, were not great. And the big deal, for Allen, was the collapsed deal. Plus, there was his awful relationship with Rondo. It reached its breaking point, surprisingly, after a win in Indianapolis the first week of April.
The surprise was not that it happened after a win. Rather, it was that Rondo and Allen weren’t initially involved. There was an argument between Brandon Bass and Paul Pierce in the locker room, and it rose to the point where teammates thought the two men were going to come to blows. It never came to that; Bass and Pierce squashed it, and everything was temporarily calm.
Out of nowhere, Rondo began verbally attacking Allen. It was nasty. It was personal. They’d both been holding in thoughts about one another, and they all came tumbling out.
Rondo said Allen was jealous of him; Allen said Rondo was “bullshitting everyone on the team” by not playing his hardest consistently and by playing for assist numbers rather than what was best for the team. Rondo said he was going to get Allen out of Boston; Allen said he’d leave before ever letting Rondo do it for him. They went back and forth, and some players and staff winced at what was said because they knew, no matter what apologies happened, those words couldn’t be taken back. And that was another reality: Everyone knew there wasn’t going to be an apology. Of the two, Allen was wired to be politic. There was just no way Rondo was going there. This relationship was dead.
It was awkward for teammates. Pierce and Rondo had become quite close, and so had Rondo and KG. The four of them couldn’t all hang out together, though. The nastiness between Rondo and Allen was too deep. They weren’t living in Ubuntu, and they were far from Rome. They weren’t even in the state of mind of those close-knit Celtics who had come before them.
After the season, one of them had to go.
Allen’s right ankle was in pain from bone spurs, and he knew it would require surgery as soon as the season ended. But he was going to give this group what he had. He’d get cortisone shots, whatever he needed to do. He’d do it for Pierce and Garnett, and he’d get through it with Rondo.
Realistically, this was the last shot for them all. Ainge had already agreed to deal one of the Big Three, albeit temporarily. Garnett and Allen would be free agents in July. Next year’s team might not include any of them.
There was hope entering the playoffs because as part of their late-season run, the Celtics faced the Heat three times over three weeks and finished 3–0. The third game was a rest game for both teams, but the other two wins were instructive. They matched up well with Miami, and their mission was to reach them—in the conference finals—in one piece.
The Celtics knew they’d have to do that in the early rounds without Allen, who was hopeful he could play in the second round. They were disappointed when, for one game, they had to do it without Rondo. He chest-bumped official Marc Davis in the playoff opener against the Hawks, a loss, earning a league suspension and a seat for the game two win. Pierce picked everyone up with 36 points and 14 rebounds.
Boston was able to win three of the next four games and the series. Miami eliminated the Knicks the night before, so the Heat was moving on as well.
Heat-Celtics had become a series with player rivalries, but there was some hostility in the front offices as well. Heat president Pat Riley coached the Lakers during the height of the Celtics-Lakers trilogy (1984, 1985, 1987). Larry Bird and Magic Johnson emerged from those games as close friends, but they were the exception. Fighting for the title every June took a lot out of you and put something in you, too.
Twenty-five years later, some of the current Celtics could relate to the old hostility. Pierce, KG, and Rondo could never imagine being friendly with the Heat. Allen, who grew up in environments in which he was always trying to fit in, could. He believed in diplomacy, and those three couldn’t care less about it.
After the Celtics and Heat each won their second-round series, a broken Boston arrived in South Beach for the conference finals. The Celtics beat the 76ers and lost Avery Bradley in the process. The guard, who’d become the starter over Allen, dislocated his shoulder and was out for the postseason. Allen, bum ankle and all, was back in his usual slot.
In 2011, the Heat won the first two games of the series, and the Celtics never got back in it. The first two games of the 2012 rematch, even with a higher entertainment value, seemed to be going in the same direction.
The first game was tied at halftime, and then Miami ran away in the second half and won by 14. Game two was a Rondo jewel. Even standing on the same court as James, the best player in the world, he didn’t look out of place. Smart teams played off Rondo so they could give him jumpers and clog passing lanes. He wasn’t nearly as dangerous when relegated to outside shooting, but he was in game two.
There was also no slippage in his handling of the offense. The Celtics went up by 15 in the second quarter, and it should have been a sign of what was coming when the 15-point cushion was cut to 7 in the next four minutes.
Again, perhaps as an indication of how much they’d drained their depth, the Celtics wavered in the third quarter and lost their lead altogether. But with four minutes left in the game, they seemed to be trending toward a win. In a great sequence, Pierce hit a jumper to put the Celtics up by 5 and then went to the other end of the court to block a Mario Chalmers shot. Eventually Rondo got the ball, and he fed Allen for a 3-point attempt that would have been devastating had it gone in.
No good.
One minute later the game was tied on a Shane Battier 3. Allen did save the Celtics from a loss in regulation. His team down by 3 with thirty-five seconds left, Allen made a 3 to send the game to overtime. But the Celtics lost it there, and a 44-point, 10-assist, 8-rebound Rondo game became a pleasant footnote.
So much for the rivalry. In the last seven playoff games, the Heat had won six.
While the Heat may have quietly conceded that the Celtics were too proud and talented to be swept, there’s no way they saw any path to what happened next: two wins in Boston, including one of the oddest overtime periods in playoff history. That was in game four, when the Celtics got off to a roaring 18–4 start and led by as many as 18 in the second quarter.
But it said something about the Celtics, as well as the nature of binary basketball analysis, that some of their flaws were being ignored. It was as if the bottom line, a win or loss, was the tell-all in each game even if long series don’t work that way.
Eventually, a deficiency that you have will be attacked until you can either fix it or hide it. There was no hiding those poor Celtics third quarters, and they didn’t have enough players to fix it. The Heat went at them in the third and reduced that previous big lead to 5.
The game evened out in the fourth quarter, and then it was as if both teams lost data. It was a surprising and almost comical power outage in which both of them combined for just 6 overtime points. It was worse for the Celtics, who won a playoff game by totaling only 32 points in the final twenty-nine minutes.
More shocking, though, was game five. Back in Miami, the Celtics had the Heat contemplating playoff elimination. Leading by just a point, 87–86, with a minute left in the game, the Celtics had the ball and got it to Pierce. He was being guarded by James, who Pierce believed allowed him too much space to operate. It hadn’t been a good shooting night for Pierce, and it had for James. It didn’t matter. Pierce briefly stepped back and launched a 3. As soon as it went in, Miami head coach Erik Spoelstra wanted a timeout. Pierce jogged to the Celtics bench and announced, “I’m cold-blooded.”
The Celtics led the series, 3–2, and that was a call to action for the temporary allies. That is, once again, millions of people with various agendas coming together to root against the Miami Heat. In the minutes after the loss, Spoelstra all but acknowledged that he knew what was coming before game six in Boston.
“It’s a loss, and that’s all it is. And that’s what our focus is right now, to fight any kind of noise from the outside…”
The noise from the outside was at nonstop concert levels. There was general Heat mockery; questions about the legacy of LeBron; debates about whether the Miami trio would be traded if it lost game six; wondering about the job status of Spoelstra; praise for the toughness of the Celtics; and, again, a reminder from those in the Dan Gilbert camp that James was forty-eight minutes away from no title.
The Boston Garden crowd was anticipatory. Last year notwithstanding, the fans were used to being in this position against James teams and having celebratory drinks afterward. Before his players took the court, Rivers looked at them all and said, “They still haven’t seen our best yet. They’re going to see our best tonight. I can feel it…”
James was feeling something else, and he had been since Pierce hit that shot in his face. He respected Pierce and liked his game; he didn’t like the guy all that much, though. James was annoyed at Pierce’s trash talk and the snapshot summary of that game itself. The Heat hadn’t won, and that was all that mattered. But if the suggestion was that James should have been better, maybe the critics should have been expecting something historic and favorable for Miami.
James had finished with 30 points and 13 rebounds in the game, and Pierce was 6 for 19. So if James indeed had more to give, it was likely to be delivered forcefully in game six.
Which is what happened, and it was over fast. James was stoic most of the night, not at all resembling the player who enjoyed getting others involved in the game before he took it over. He was impatient and aggressive, and everyone could see that this was going to be ugly for Boston.
Sometimes those power-to-power transfers happen as a team clinches a series. It was that way when the original Big Three Celtics passed the power to the Bad Boy Pistons and the Pistons passed it, reluctantly, to the Michael Jordan Bulls. In 2008, the Big Three took it from the Pistons in Detroit to wrap up the series. And now, even though this thing was going to a winner-take-all game seven, a separation had taken place.
If LeBron could do what he was doing to the Celtics, they couldn’t beat his team anymore. Not with who he was becoming and what they were becoming. Right here, this night, was the intersection of his championship ascent and their championship fall. It was over. The transfer was unofficial, and to retrieve it, all James and the Heat had to do was keep playing.
In the first half, James hit them with his shots and moves reminiscent of others. He dribbled toward Pierce, waited for the double-team, and then sped by when he noticed it was late. One second later he was in the air, with Garnett watching, and then he punched in a dunk. That was his. He went baseline and then hit a jumper off one leg. That was Dirk Nowitzki’s. He did a spin move on another jumper: Earl Monroe. A teammate missed a free throw, and here he is, out of nowhere, cupping it and slamming it. Scottie Pippen used to do that often.
He had 30 in the first half. He finished the game with 45 points, 15 rebounds, and 5 assists. The fans in the Garden appreciated what they’d seen from both teams. No one had had a playoff line like James’s since Wilt Chamberlain, so that was historic. For the Celtics, aged and competitive, the crowd chanted “Let’s go, Celtics” throughout the fourth quarter, even when they were down by as many as 23. They had more to say than that, of course, but the chant covered it all: Go win game seven because this series isn’t over—but if it is, thanks for all you’ve done the last five years.
Celtics fans knew their team intimately, so they understood what was at stake in game seven. It was impossible to lose game sevens with a core like this and expect to just run it back one more time.
There was no shame in how their final game together as contenders unfolded. It followed the pattern of a team that was very good and not great: excellent first twenty to twenty-two minutes with a double-digit lead; a slide in the middle where the lead shrinks; and the fade to black in the final three to four minutes.
For the first and maybe last time, it was Miami and Boston for the right to go to the finals. The younger star trio beat the older one. The Heat were now thinking about their immediate future—against the Oklahoma City Thunder in the finals—while what was ahead for the Big Three and Rondo was more uncertain.
Rivers was emotional postgame. The season had turned him into a conductor, of game plans, lineups, and squabbles. He was highly respected for his basketball mind, so before leaving he had to confess what was a painful truth for all of them: “I thought we had nothing left.”
Even if they had gotten to the finals, Allen would have had to tap out of them, leaving the Celtics further depleted. His bone spurs had become so bothersome that he told himself that he had one more game—game seven—before he would ask the team doctors to shut him down. Maybe Allen would have been rejuvenated playing in the finals against a team he had a historical connection to—before Boston. Seattle was probably the only non-Miami market passionately rooting for James to win the title since that would mean the Thunder—also known as the stolen Sonics—didn’t.
James and the Heat won their title quite easily, in five games, and James completed a year in which he won the MVP, got by the Celtics, and won the NBA Finals MVP as well. The Celtics either didn’t watch it at all or watched it with a sneer. Garnett and Pierce particularly wanted another shot at them. They respected James but had no fear or hesitation about playing against him.
They also had the privilege of thinking that way because they both had Celtics contracts now that Garnett had re-upped with Boston. Allen sent Garnett a congratulatory text on his deal and then added, “I don’t think they’re going to pay me.”
Garnett told Allen not to worry about it. Of course the Celtics would bring him back. He’d come off the bench, most likely, because Bradley was their future at shooting guard. Allen would still be an important part of the team, though.
Allen thought about his free agency in 2010, how everyone in the organization seemed to call him and say how much they wanted him to return. It was different this time. It was more transactional; more, Here’s the offer; what do you want to do?
What he wanted, honestly, wasn’t realistic. It was realistic for employees, just not employees in his business. He wanted to be able to call Boston home and know that it wasn’t going to change. He wanted to know that his family was here, their doctors and nurses were here for his son Walker, and that the community of Boston would be as important to him as his employers.
It was never going to happen. Not in Boston, not anywhere. They’d traded him during the season and even taken calls about Pierce and Garnett. If he came back, he wouldn’t be coming back to security. And that made him wonder what exactly he was coming back for.
He and Rondo were too different to ever be close. Besides, the organization continued to promote him despite all the things that he’d done, behind the scenes and for the public to see. Allen compared what he was hearing in Boston, a response that he considered halfhearted, to the recruitment he got from Miami. He’d come off the bench there, too, but they sounded excited for him to be there.
At dinner, he and Spoelstra excitedly talked basketball while Pat Riley raved about a book he was reading, The Four Agreements, about pursuing freedom and happiness based on ancient Toltec wisdom. This seemed like the right fit for Allen, even if he understood what the Boston fans would think of it.
He got the irony: He would have had the fans on his side if he had been traded to a bad situation, like Memphis, with no choice in his future; the fans would be against him for going to a good situation, Miami, with a say in what was best for him.
He’d been around long enough to anticipate the fan response. It was vile in some cases. They were understandably emotional, and he knew they didn’t consider the business and workplace issues of their favorite sport. What he didn’t expect was the response of his brothers, Pierce and Garnett. He’d thought what they had was bigger than basketball. He’d thought it was a friendship.
But when he signed with Miami, they cut him off. Five years together, and it was all gone. He thought he was just signing with the Heat, but to everyone else, he was making the decision to send their relationship up in flames.