During an appearance on the Bill Simmons podcast, Kevin Garnett said the 2010 Celtics “broke” then Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James.
Just in case you were wondering, the Boston Celtics from the late 2000s and early 2010s are still salty about only getting one championship during a run when they believed they were the best team of the era.
The subject of those Celtics teams has come up more recently due to Adam Sandler’s new movie “Uncut Gems,” which stars the defensive and emotional leader of those Celtics teams, Kevin Garnett. Garnett joined Sandler in an interview with Bill Simmons on the Bill Simmons podcast, where they talked about the 2012 Eastern Conference Finals when LeBron finally got over the hump and beat the Celtics.
Garnett of course deflected talking about the 2012 Finals and instead went for one of the glory moments of his run in Boston, defeating LeBron in the 2010 Eastern Conference Finals that sent him on his way to Miami later that summer.
OK, so remember that, alright? Stop bringing it up. So they was talking (expletive) to him, the media. And the league knew that they had an agenda in which we wasn’t a part of the agenda. And that’s how they ended up winning that series. Yeah, I said it…. Man listen, let me tell something to you. The C’s, we didn’t give a (expletive) about LeBron. We didn’t fear LeBron, and we didn’t think that he could beat all five of us. And that’s how it felt. He was trying to consolidate because he didn’t want the pressure on him. You understand?”
Things are still sensitive for Garnett and they probably always will be, given the way that he talked about it. James, of course, overcame a 3-2 series deficit in the 2012 Eastern Conference Finals by putting together one of the best performances in playoff history by scoring 45 points in Boston to force a Game 7.
James and his Heat team would eventually win Game 7 before going on to beat the Oklahoma City Thunder in five games in the 2012 NBA Finals, earning LeBron his first NBA title. LeBron’s career narrative can never be told without Boston and Garnett’s attitude, to this day, is a big reason why.
The full podcast is available here.
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