No one wanted to see things play out how they did for Isaiah Thomas after he left the Boston Celtics.
Despite all his shortcomings as an NBA point guard he was beloved by the city, and that only intensified after his final postseason run with the team in the 2017 season, where Thomas led Boston to the Eastern Conference Finals after the death of his little sister.
"I went through a real-life situation with those guys," Thomas said, opening up to The Stadium's Shams Charania in a video Monday. "It wasn’t only just battling on the court, I felt like they went through that situation with my sister passing, they went through that with me."
That's what made it so hard for Celtics fans to see him leave that offseason in a trade with the Cleveland Cavaliers, even if it meant Kyrie Irving was coming to Boston as a result.
The guard understood the business decision, but the timing was unfortunate given his mental state. It was the best year of his career, and nothing has been the same for him since.
"How the trade went down, I was surprised about, which made me upset," Thomas told Charania. "Anybody in my situation, anybody that's a human that got real feelings would have felt the same way. ... I didn’t think where I was at the level I was playing that I would be caught off guard by such a big trade. That's what hurt the most. I felt like I had a relationship with the people who make those decisions. I felt like we were close enough to where we could chop it up and you could talk to me about it, or about what possibly could happen. That never happened, so I was upset about that."
Despite all that, Thomas still speaks glowingly of Boston, the city he'll always have a special bond with. All the while, he remains determined to make it back to the NBA.
In his G League debut with the Grand Rapids Gold, the Denver Nuggets' affiliate, Thomas on Wednesday dropped 42 points with six rebounds and eight assists in a narrow loss.
