Avery Bradley had a successful return to Boston as his Detroit Pistons beat the league-leading Celtics on the road, 118-108. After the game, though, Bradley realized just how much the Celtics had changed from the team he was a part of just last year.
Sign of Celtics rebuild: Avery Bradley walks into C’s locker room, and team employee says, “You don’t know anybody in there.” A minute later, Bradley walks out, says, “No, I don’t.”
— Ben Rohrbach (@brohrbach) November 28, 2017
Of the Celtics players who were in action against the Pistons, only four — Al Horford, Marcus Smart, Jaylen Brown, and Terry Rozier — were with Bradley last season. And of those four players, only Smart was with the team alongside Bradley for longer than two years.
It’s a testament to Celtics president Danny Ainge’s cut-throat managerial style that he’s overhauled the roster so drastically in such a short amount of time.
While the likes of Bradley and Isaiah Thomas served the team well, Ainge felt that Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward were the players who could propel the team to championship contention, and he made the moves to get them. His decisions have been more than justified, at least thus far.
In contrast, Avery Bradley has come into a Pistons team that has stayed mostly intact over the last few years, although not necessarily by choice, and is providing that extra bit of change they needed to spark their surprisingly strong start to the season. So while the Celtics locker room no longer feels familiar to Bradley, he's seemingly been right at home with the in-form Pistons.
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