Photo Credit: Winslow Townson/AP

Al Horford Reveals Why He Left The Boston Celtics

After the 2017-2018 NBA season, everyone thought that the Boston Celtic will develop into a serious contender for years to come.

These young Celtics had been one of the biggest success stories of that season.

A young team that lost both their All Stars, Gordon Hayward and Kyrie Irving, who both underwent season-ending surgeries, made the Conference Finals. Boston’s young core (Tatum, Brown, Rozier) played brilliantly and made the fans almost forget about Irving and Hayward.

Then, this pat season, with the two stars healthy and playing again, everyone expected the Celtics to be the East’s top dog and the start of them being a contender for many years. But in reality, the team was struggling all year long. Even worse for the franchise and its fans, the Celtics appear to be far from being a contender in these next few years.

The Celtics simply outplayed themselves and valued their draft picks more than acquiring another star that could have helped them in their quest to win an NBA title for he first time this decade.

After the departures of All-Stars Kyrie Irving and Al Horford, they’ll now truly focus on their young core.

But why did Horford end up leaving the Celtics? He now opened up about his reasoning, saying that changes were needed, while throwing subtle shade at Kyrie Irving.

Per The Boston Herald:

“I just think that if Kyrie would have stayed, I don’t know if it would have worked… It was just clear that the group that we had just wasn’t going to be able to coexist.

It was hard because of the inconsistency from our group… But also I just feel like we had so much talent, just a lot of talent, and we all wanted to do great things. There were just too many of us almost. I just feel like we had so much that it was very, very difficult to essentially keep everybody feeling good and focused on where we wanted to get to. And I do believe that that just kept getting in our way.”

 

When asked about if he had stayed if he had known Kemba Walker was coming, Horford said:

“I don’t want to get caught up in the past, but, yeah, that would have been totally different.”