Celtics’ Kristaps Porziņģis found a home — and ring — by continuing to embrace change

Celtics’ Kristaps Porziņģis found a home — and ring — by continuing to embrace change

BOSTON — He meant what he said.

“I had to live to the words I said in the (podium) interview: I would die for this team to win,” Kristaps Porziņģis said quietly — well, he’s pretty quiet most of the time — in a small room somewhere in the bowels of TD Garden early Tuesday morning. He had a smile on his face. But every step he took hurt. He was not wearing shoes. All he had on  were compression socks. But it hurt less to walk around the Garden in his stocking feet. It was the price to pay for being a part of an NBA championship team.

So Porziņģis gutted out 16 minutes in the Boston Celtics’ Game 5 clincher Monday night against the Dallas Mavericks. He played with a torn medial retinaculum in his left leg, an injury he suffered during Game 2 of the NBA Finals that kept him out of Games 3 and 4 in Dallas. The retinaculum passes from the quadriceps to the tibia and helps stabilize your patella. The tear Porziņģis suffered caused his posterior tibialis tendon to dislocate. It’s a rare injury in sports, but it’s a real one.

Porziņģis was far from his usual self. But he made a couple of baskets, drew a couple of fouls, changed a couple of shots at the rim and grabbed a rebound. It wasn’t much, but it helped.

The injury, he told The Athletic early Tuesday morning, will require surgery. But with this version of the Celtics desperate to raise an 18th banner to the rafters and end the franchise’s 16-year drought since its last title in 2008, Porziņģis was willing to wreck whatever offseason plans he previously had.

“If we didn’t do it, it would be a big disappointment, 100 percent,” he told The Athletic. “But that’s the risk I wanted to take, and it paid off. … I’m gonna need surgery, obviously, now, in the offseason. But, man, all I wanted to do was give everything I could to the team. The medical staff did everything they could on their part to get me out there. And it paid off.”

So there was Porziņģis, stopping to do every interview, whether in English, Spanish or his native Latvian. He hugged everyone in sight, including his teammate, Sam Hauser.

“The amount of people that think I’m your brother? It is insane,” said Hauser, incredulous, because while Porziņģis is very close to his two older brothers, one of whom serves as one of his agents, neither of them had become a solid role player for the storied Celtics or dropped a couple of 3s in a finals-clinching game.

Everything in the last year of Porziņģis’ life forced him out of his comfort zone and to this moment.

He gave up money to come to Boston. A potential free agent last summer, he could have stayed on a Washington Wizards team that probably would have featured him this season, for a lot more cheddar — a likely $180 million extension over four years, the most the team could have offered, if he opted into the final year of his existing deal. At least, a Wizards team under the previous constraints put on the team to constantly try to make the playoffs, even if it was light years from being a contender. When Wizards governor Ted Leonsis fired former team president Tommy Sheppard after last season and brought in Clippers executive Michael Winger and Thunder assistant general manager Will Dawkins to run the team, he gave them the option to tear everything down to the studs and start over. They took him up on it.

Still, Porziņģis could have stayed in D.C. on a less-than-max deal. He could have put up the empty calories of big stats amassed by the best player on a mediocre team, maybe squeaked out some All-Star consideration. At 22.9 points and 8.5 rebounds per game during his 82-game stint over a little less than a season and a half in Washington, he could have continued being comfortable. But he wanted more out of his career.

He’d already gone through the Unicorn days in New York, when he’d burst upon the scene as the Knicks’ highest draft pick (fourth overall, 2015) since Patrick Ewing and made his only All-Star appearance. He’d tried to find common ground with Luka Dončić in Dallas, with some success, but not nearly enough. And there was nothing close to a winning path with the Wizards. So he engineered a sign-and-trade with Boston, which resulted in his signing a two-year deal for $60 million through 2026.

And he cost the Celtics Marcus Smart, who’d been the heart and soul of the team for nine seasons, the sinew and nastiness behind the offensive skills of Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. But Smart was 29 last summer, and he was only going to get more expensive going forward, and Boston was pot committed to both Brown and Tatum going forward. Plus, the 7-foot-2 Porziņģis was someone the Celtics had wanted for some time. He addressed a searing need for the Celtics’ half-court offense: what to do against defenses that went all-out to swarm Boston’s preferred method of raining 3s on the opposition.

Porziņģis could shoot from deep, too. But he made the Celtics lethal all over the floor. He shot a career-best 60.6 percent on 2-pointers this season, raising the Celtics’ team percentage on 2s from 56.7 last season to 57.5 this season. Those marginal improvements helped Boston become the NBA’s best offense this season, and one of the best ever, blowtorching opposing defenses night after night. Porziņģis’ improvement in the half court in Washington, where he also became an elite rim protector in legit starter minutes, made him a perfect fit for Boston.

No one in the league has a better third offensive option than Porziņģis, who averaged 20 per game this season, moving into the endless space Boston’s offense created all season and attacking the mismatches created by the Celtics’ relentless ball movement, screening (or, ghost screening) and spacing.

And Porziņģis quickly became a crowd favorite. The TD Garden crowd roared in Game 1 of the finals when he returned from the calf injury that kept him out of most of the first three rounds of the playoffs. Monday, they went bonkers when the arena scoreboard showed Porziņģis coming onto the court before tip-off, having spent all day getting ice, stim and all manner of treatments to get him back on the court.

“He’s just a great teammate, a great competitor,” teammate Derrick White said after the clincher. “I was happy for him that he was able to go out there. The crowd cheering him on like that just got him going. … He’s special.”

Boston will have a long-term decision to make about its centers soon. Al Horford is supposedly returning next year for an 18th season at age 39, according to governor Wyc Grousbeck. And, technically, Porziņģis will be a free agent in the summer of 2026. But it doesn’t feel like he’s going to be all that hard for the Celtics to re-sign. After a decade in the league, he’s found what matters most to him. And the best chance to preserve and continue that is on this team, where everyone is committed to the same things as he now is motivated to do, and to keep the party going.

“My priorities changed,” Porziņģis said in the wee small hours of the morning Tuesday, finally an NBA champion. “It wasn’t as much, any more, about money. I wanted to win. I had an opportunity to play for a historic franchise like Boston and win a championship here. Man, I couldn’t resist that opportunity.”

(Photo of Kristaps Porziņģis: Elsa / Getty Images)

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Boston Celtics,NBA