Dallas Basketball

Mavs’ Tim Hardaway Jr. Speaks on Celtics Crowd: ‘It Gets Rowdy … We Got Kyrie Irving’

The Dallas Mavericks take on the Boston Celtics at TD Garden on Friday night, and Tim Hardaway Jr. warns that his team must be ready for a “rowdy” crowd.

Dalton Trigg

Mavs’ Tim Hardaway Jr. Speaks on Celtics Crowd: ‘It Gets Rowdy … We Got Kyrie Irving’
Mavs’ Tim Hardaway Jr. Speaks on Celtics Crowd: ‘It Gets Rowdy … We Got Kyrie Irving’ /
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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.

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“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.

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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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Dalton Trigg
DALTON TRIGG

Dalton Trigg is the Editor-In-Chief for Dallas Basketball, as well as the Executive Editor overseeing Inside The Rockets, Inside The Spurs, All Knicks, and The Magic Insider. He is the founder and host for the Mavs Step Back Podcast, which is a proud part of the Blue Wire podcast network. Trigg graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi’s College of Business and Economic Development with a bachelor’s degree in entrepreneurship in 2016. After spending a few years with multiple Dallas Mavericks-related blogs, including SB Nation’s Mavs Moneyball, Trigg joined DallasBasketball.com as a staff writer in 2018 and never looked back. At the start of 2022, he was promoted to the EIC title he holds now. Through the years, Trigg has conducted a handful of high-profile one-on-one interviews to add to his resume — in both writing and podcasting. Some of his biggest interviews have been with Mavs owner Mark Cuban, Mavs GM Nico Harrison, now-retired legend Dirk Nowitzki and many other current/former players and team staffers. Many of those interviews and other articles by Trigg have been aggregated by other well-known sports media websites, such as Yahoo Sports, CBS Sports, Bleacher Report and others. You can find Trigg on all major social media channels, but his most prevalent platform is on Twitter. Whether it’s posting links to his DBcom work, live-tweeting Mavs games or merely giving his opinions on things going on with Dallas and the rest of the NBA, the daily content never stops rolling. For any inquiries, please email Dalton@MavsStepBack.com.

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