Kristaps Porzingis has gone through it all to reach NBA Finals stage
NY Post
BOSTON — Kristaps Porzingis has seen it all in his nine NBA years. A roller coaster can’t quite describe the journey from booed to beloved to injured to villainized to embraced to injured to embarrassed to forgotten to center stage of the NBA Finals.
And it started, appropriately, when Knicks fans jeered him on draft night in 2015 — a moment he used as motivation to prove the detractors wrong.
“I was a kid full of just ignorance and ready to take on the world,” Porzingis said in an interview with The Post. “Which is adequate for those kind of years. But now I’m much more mature and have a different kind of mindset. And I’m in a perfect situation for me which is what I wanted from the beginning — to play on the biggest stage for a championship. Nothing else.”
Porzingis is back in the spotlight Thursday for Game 1 of the NBA Finals, the X factor of the series with storylines percolating about his health, failed stint in Dallas and an alleged rocky relationship with Luka Doncic. The center is returning from a 10-game absence because of a calf strain and the prevailing sentiment is the Celtics are unbeatable if he’s at 100 percent.
Without Porzingis, they’re still probably favored against the Mavericks. With him? Boston’s frontcourt issues, its lone weak spot during a steamroll through the Eastern Conference, are theoretically alleviated.
We’ll see.
Aaron Judge had an Opening Day negotiating deadline in 2022 when he was coming up on the final year of his contract before free-agent eligibility, and that seems to have worked out just fine for No. 99 — perhaps the first time ever in a hockey column that numeral does not refer to Wayne Gretzky — and the Yankees.