Boston Celtics fans are growing more pessimistic by the day with the way the team has played recently, but one member of the defending champion Golden State Warriors still considers them as much of a threat as he did before the season started.
With the Celtics set to take on the Warriors at Golden State on Tuesday, Kevin Durant was asked about his upcoming opponent losing five of its past six games. He said he thinks their “top talent” still makes them one of the better teams in the Eastern Conference.
“They’re right up there at the top,” Durant said, per Nick Friedell of ESPN.com. “They’ve been losing a couple games but they’ve got the top talent, some of the top talent on that team, so they’ll be fine once the playoffs start.”
The attitude surrounding the Celtics is far more concerning than their 38-26 record, which currently places them fifth in the East. Boston looked much better a year ago without Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward, but Durant expects them to get better down the stretch.
“They’ve got a bunch of young players, they’ve got a couple veterans that have been through the struggle, so they’re still trying to figure each other out,” he said. “It takes more than just a half a year or a whole year to figure it out. They’re just going to keep growing, so what you see right now is probably not the finished product.”
Again, the bigger concern is the potential locker room issues the Celtics are having. Irving has been incredibly short with the media, and there are reports that some of that is spilling over into the locker room. Winning games would probably solve a lot of that, but the drama may also stand in the way of winning.
