Celtics Owner Shares Story Of Booting Danny Ainge From Locker Room

The Boston Celtics reunited with an old friend amid their 2022 NBA playoff run.

As Celtics owner Wyc Grousbeck revealed during an appearance Tuesday on WEEI’s “The Greg Hill Show,” former team president of basketball operations Danny Ainge met up with Boston while it was battling the Milwaukee Bucks in Round 2. And after one of those Eastern Conference semifinals games, Grousbeck clearly got a kick out of telling the new Utah Jazz CEO that he needed to leave the locker room.

“He was so instrumental while he was here,” Grousbeck said. “It really pained me to have to threaten to throw him out of the locker room when he showed up all of a sudden in the Milwaukee series. I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, guests are not allowed in this locker room. You represent the Utah Jazz.’ So that was a lot of fun. We all had a pretty good laugh about that. It really pained me to have to throw him out of the locker room.”

Ainge’s locker room access will be limited once again Thursday night when the Celtics and the Warriors open the NBA Finals. Tipoff for Game 1 at Chase Center is scheduled for 9 p.m. ET.