It wasn’t just losing behind Smart’s ire after Game 2 loss vs Heat

Marcus Smart shared how a painful anniversary collided with avoidable losses – and how his chosen family helped pick him (and themselves) up.

Turns out there might have been more to the Boston Celtics locker room spat after their Game 2 loss to the Miami Heat.

Yes, poor performance was undoubtedly a factor, as was a failed response to a disciplined Heat roster — but according to The Athletic’s Sam Amick, the primary person involved in the brouhaha was Marcus Smart, “already ‘tipping over’ emotionally” from the two-year anniversary of his mother’s death.

Camelia Smart was the center of Marcus’ world until her passing — and the memory of it certainly couldn’t have been an easy thing to navigate with everything else going on in the world.

That difficult remembrance mashed together with such a critical, avoidable loss was simply too much for the Flower Mound native to handle, but his family of teammates was there to listen, and respond.

“I don’t want to use it as an excuse but it definitely played a role to a certain extent,” he explained. “It’s definitely an emotional day.”

“You’re already on an emotional scale where you’re already tipping over, and then something like (that happens) where you should’ve won for the second time against a really good team that you allowed to come back and steal both games from you.”

“It just pushed it over the edge,” Smart added. “It was just — we were all disappointed. It was just disappointing.”

“We lost two games that we should have won, and nobody was happy. I probably would have felt in trouble with the team as a team — like, we would’ve felt in trouble — if everybody was calm,” the Texan explained.

Instead of retreating inwards, the Celtics hashed things out, and used that emotion to fuel a big Game 3 win.

Check out the rest of Amick’s conversation with Smart on the aftermath of that blow-up, and what it has done for the team since.

As the man himself intimates, “If you can’t talk, if you can’t yell, if you can’t express how you truly feel with somebody who’s supposed to have your back … then are you really supposed to be trusting that person?”

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