BOSTON — Isaiah Thomas enters Friday’s game against his former Phoenix Suns in the midst of an historic stretch for the Boston Celtics.
As Brad Stevens tells it, though, his point guard was a couple minutes away from not leaving Phoenix in the first place.
The Celtics acquired Thomas from the Suns just before the NBA trade deadline on Feb. 19, 2015, in exchange for guard Marcus Thornton and a 2016 first-round pick. The move has done wonders for the 5-foot-9 point guard, who led Boston in scoring down the stretch last season and is averaging a career-high 21.6 points per game this season.
Ahead of Friday’s game at TD Garden, Thomas’ coach recalled how the trade went down. Ironically enough, the team was in Sacramento ahead of their matchup with the Kings, Thomas’ previous club before Phoenix.
“I don’t remember it great because I was preparing for the next game,” Stevens said. “I was actually getting ready for a team meeting right at the deadline, and then we were all going to go and practice, because we were in Sacramento at the time.
“I got a call from (Celtics president of basketball operations) Danny (Ainge) probably 10 minutes before the deadline, and he said, ‘It doesn’t look like we’re going to do anything.’ Then I got a call eight minutes later that said, ‘We’ve talked about this real briefly, but what do you think?’ So it was obviously a unique, quick, last-minute thing. So he was either throwing me a curveball or things really did happen at that last minute.”
The last-minute nature of the trade didn’t give Stevens too much time to connect with his new player: Thomas had to fly back to Boston to undergo his physical and played his first game as a Celtic two days against the Los Angeles Lakers. (He got ejected in the second half.)
Yet the head coach relied on the wonders of technology to make things work.
“The first time I ever talked to him was on FaceTime, about our playbook,” Stevens said. “We watched our playbook together on FaceTime. And then two days later I met him, and I always give him grief because he didn’t make it to the end of that (Lakers) game, and then we were in Phoenix a day later. So it was kind of a crazy whirlwind there.”
Such is the nature of NBA life around the trade deadline. But considering how Thomas has performed in a Celtics uniform to date, we’d imagine Stevens is just fine with how things shook out.
Thumbnail photo via Mark J. Rebilas/USA TODAY Sports Images
