Crowder turns page on old club
INDEPENDENCE, Ohio — Jae Crowder still gets emotional when he speaks about the day he learned he’d been traded from the Celtics to Cleveland. But perspective prevents him from harboring the same type of ill feelings as Isaiah Thomas.
Crowder was in Houston with his mother, who was in the end game of a long fight with cancer. She passed away five minutes after he told her of the deal.
Under the circumstances, getting traded seemed stunningly unimportant.
“I mean, I would have never expected it to go down like that,” Crowder said as he walked away from a group interview following the Cavaliers’ practice yesterday. “It was a crazy, hectic day. But things happen for a reason, I guess. My mom was sick. She wasn’t doing well. I was with her the whole summer in Houston. It was hard, man.”
As he continued, you could almost see the 6-foot-6 forward turn a page in his mind.
“But the things that happened,” he said, “really made me into a different human being. It just molded me into a different person. It made me look at stuff differently. I appreciate things more.”
He appreciates that he is with a team that doesn’t just hope, but fully expects to be back in the NBA Finals for a fourth straight season. And he appreciates that the disappointment of being traded from a place where you’d planted basketball roots pales in comparison to what life can throw at you.
“You realize there are things you can’t control,” Crowder said. “You can’t control a lot of the stuff that happens in your life. I can’t control where I play right now. It’s a business. I’m in a business.
“What I can control is me playing basketball and how I treat my family and how I raise my child in the time that I have to spend on this earth. You know what I mean? I can’t control what happens with trades.”
Like Thomas, Crowder is grateful for what his time with the Celtics meant to his career. But where Thomas has a chip on his shoulder regarding Danny Ainge and the way things played out, saying he may never talk again to the C’s president of basketball ops, Crowder is more about moving on.
“I’m thankful of the opportunity they gave me obviously,” said Crowder, who was rescued from the fringes in Dallas by the Rajon Rondo trade. “I know that it’s a business, man. I’m not mad. I’m not upset. It was a bad time for everything, but at the same time, I’ve moved on from that. My family’s done a great job of keeping me in the moment and keeping me focused on the task at hand. And I came into a great locker room, so that helped a lot.
“But I have no bad blood with those guys. I’m just thinking about my goal here, and that’s to win a championship. I just want to do my part and hold my end up.”
That begins tomorrow when the Celts show up to open the NBA season. Earlier with the collection of cameras and recorders looking on, Crowder said, “I mean, it’s the first game on the schedule, so we’re preparing to play those guys. We’re putting in the game plan. So that’s the team my focus is on right now.”
The radical transformation of the roster became clear to him.
“It was understood when I talked to those guys,” he said. “The trade showed me the direction of the team, and I was cool with it. Nothing more; nothing less.”
And, yes, he was a tad shocked to see a 53-win team change so greatly.
“I was, but now I’m not,” Crowder said. “I’m over it. I moved on. I’m with a great group of guys right here who’s work very, very hard each day we’ve been in practice. It’s been fun to be around. If course, at the time I was shocked, but now that I’ve moved on, I’m not. So that’s where I’m at with it now.”
As for how different the Celts will play with four new starters and 10 new players in the roster, he said, “Brad (Stevens) is a smart guy. He’s going to tweak a few things. He’s a coach that coaches to the strength of his players. So things may change, but at the same time I think the base of stuff that they want to accomplish is going to be the same.”
And if Crowder runs into Ainge?
“Yeah, I’ll say hello,” he said with a smile.