As the Dallas Mavericks prepare to take on the league-leading Boston Celtics to close out a tough four-game road trip, players know they must be ready for the “rowdy” TD Garden crowd.
“One of the best sports towns, and it’d probably be the top tier sports town in the country,” Mavs shooting guard Tim Hardaway Jr. said.
“They're very passionate fans, we know that. Me playing in New York for four years, being in the same division as them, I understand the magnitude of how it gets rowdy in here, so [we] just have to embrace it, play through it, and we have Kai here, so we know what we have to do, we know what we gotta do out here, that's all I have to say.”
Kyrie Irving, who has arguably played the best basketball of his career with the Mavs this season, left the Celtics in 2019 to join Kevin Durant with the Brooklyn Nets, and Boston fans haven’t shown him much love ever since, to put it mildly.
In April of 2022, during a first-round playoff series, some fans in the Celtics crowd directed some extremely inappropriate language at Irving, which resulted in the eight-time All-Star getting fined for flipping them off.
Needless to say, don’t expect Irving to receive the same kind of love he did from the Cleveland Cavaliers earlier in this Mavs’ four-game road trip. Hopefully both sides can keep from crossing any lines as some high-level basketball is played between the Mavs and Celtics. With a win, Dallas could solidify its standing as a title contender, and that should be the main focus Irving, Luka Doncic and the rest of the Mavs.
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