Marcus Smart vehemently has defended Kyrie Irving after the Boston Celtics struggled to live up to expectations during the 2018-19 season.
Irving, being the team’s star point guard, took plenty of heat from fans and media alike following Boston’s second-round exit. Smart previously had called that heat bogus, to put it politely, and he continued to do so on Monday, defending his now-former teammate.
Smart joined ESPN’s “The Jump” Monday afternoon and spoke about what it was like going through the ups and downs with Irving last season.
“Let me make this be clear: We, not just me, the world, even Kyrie knows, he didn’t play up to the standard that he wanted to, but there’s four other guys out there with him, there’s a coach out there, we’re all supposed to be one team,” Smart said. “So you can’t put the blame on just one guy, because there’s things that everybody could have done better to not just help Kyrie, but help each other.
“And when you’re going in, especially when you’re trying to build that camaraderie, when you start singling guys out, it makes it really hard. And we’ve seen it inside the locker room and things like that, with guys calling guys out and it just wasn’t working for us. So for me, I just wanted to let people know that yes, we understand that Kyrie wasn’t up to Kyrie’s standard, but there’s four other guys, there’s a whole roster full of coaches, everybody participated.”
Despite backing up his fellow guard, Smart was pretty open about the team’s struggles, calling them “dysfunctional.”
“I mean let’s call a spade a spade, right? It’s true. We were dysfunctional,” he said.
Dysfunctional? Yes. But Smart says that dysfunction was an on-court problem. According to the 25-year-old, the team enjoyed hanging out with one another off the floor.
“We actually liked each other,” Smart said. “Off the court, we actually hung out with each other. Things got on the court, it was just everybody was put in a situation trying to help the team the only way that they knew how. We got guys scoring the ball, that’s what they do. They don’t know anything else, that’s what they do, that’s how they made their name. And you’re asking guys to take a step back and not be themselves, and that was hard for a lot of guys. It’s hard for anybody to look at themselves in the mirror and sacrifice something, and that’s just what it was for us. Everybody was trying so hard to help the team, but they didn’t know what exactly to do.”
