The Brooklyn Nets and Boston Celtics are going to play each other in Game 1 of the first round of the 2022 NBA Playoffs, but the battle for supremacy in the league’s Eastern Conference has already begun in an outbreak of perhaps poorly-chosen verbiage.
Speaking to the media after their play-in win over the Cleveland Cavaliers to secure the East’s seventh seed and the right to play the second-seeded Celtics, an enthusiastic Bruce Brown let his thoughts about the incoming series with Boston and said some things he probably wished he was able to retract almost as soon as he had said them out loud.
Superstar teammate Kevin Durant certainly did — and said as much.
“What did Bruce Brown say when he got up here?” asked Durant. “He said something I didn’t like, somebody just told me.”
What Brown said began as a fairly innocuous, even accurate assessment of the job in front of them. “We can’t let (Jayson) Tatum get 50,” Brown began.
“We’ve got to be physical with them.”
Then, the record scratch happened, sucking all of the air out of the room as the Nets wing uttered the words that will likely be plastered across the minds of Boston’s frontcourt players.
If not the locker room or even jumbotron as motivation material par excellence.
“Now they don’t have Robert Williams, so they have less of a presence in the paint, and we could attack Al Horford and (Daniel) Theis,” said Brown. “So them not having Robert Williams is huge.”
Durant, of course, was clearly nonplussed by his fellow Net’s words. “That’s caffeine pride talking,” Durant said.
“He takes something before the game. Those two dudes (Theis and Horford) can do the same stuff. It ain’t going to be that easy, I tell you that.”
Durant then went into full damage control mode, but it was already too late as earnest as his words seemed to be.
“We respect our opponents. We don’t need to talk about what we’re going to do to them. I just don’t like that, but that’s how Bruce…