Draymond
first said this back in November. But yeah if it happened "repeatedly", surely there is at least
one instance that was caught by a mic or remarked upon contemporaneously, right Draymond?
It's not like it would be unbelievable if it happened - hell, Bruins fans have said some ugly shit to Joel Ward and PK Subban. It just seems unlikely that it happened in this instance, to anything near the degree he described. There's 100 mics listening in there, not one picked up an N-word or another slur?
Let me see what we've got for
recent history:
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Mar 2016: Reporter sees some fans racially abusing Jose Calderon; he and other fans give them shit right back and get the perpetrators ejected.
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Mar 2019: Fan banned for 2 years for being verbally abusive to GSW's DeMarcus Cousins; Cousins had said he'd used a racial taunt under his breath, investigation found verbal abuse but couldn't prove that, so ban was for 2 years rather than lifetime.
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Dec 2019: Gilbert Arenas relates a very-believable story of a young fan racially abusing him, he makes it a playful game with the kid, ends up pointing out he's wearing a Pierce jersey, and ends up making the kid an Arenas fan.
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Feb 2020: Marc Spears interviews many current and former players on the subject, retells the ugly history from the 60s and 70s, Bill Russell, but then Pierce changing KG's mind about it. Perkins quote: “I never dealt with any racism one time in eight years". Avery Bradley said his brother had a racist incident at a Bruins game. Jaylen and Jayson both say they've never heard anything.
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Oct 2020: Marcus Smart writes in the Players Tribune, mentions the incident "a few years back" at a crosswalk while he was driving home after a game: woman (with her two kids, and wearing an IT4 jersey) calls him the N-word
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May 2021: Kyrie Irving
says he expects to get racist remarks when he returns to Boston in the playoffs. Marcus Smart says he's "heard a couple things" from the fans in his time there. Jaylen Brown did not say he'd experienced it, but did make some
poignant remarks about how racism is bigger than a playoff game and trying to use it for sympathy is lame. A few months later, Irving was almost
hit by a thrown bottle, and the fan was arrested.
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July 2022: Lebron James is asked why he hates Boston, responds "Because they're racist as fuck". Says he once had a beer thrown at him as he left a game. Is mostly talking about the intensity of the fan opposition, though, and doesn't give any specifics about racial abuse.
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Sep 2022: Big Baby Davis says "they were never racist
to me", implying he heard it directed at opposing players. Gilbert Arenas responds, tells a story about Virginia. Seriously though, Arenas is making a fan out of me, what a guy.
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Sep 2022: Stephen A Smith implies that the Celtics were racist to leak the Ime Udoka suspension for philandering when he could say the same about a bunch of other sports figures. Which given that the Udoka story has been one of absolute omerta on the part of the Celtics, falls kinda flat to me.
Seems to me like in the post-KG era of Celtics fans, any accusations of them racially abusing opponents are just rumor and innuendo echoing "well everybody knows that Boston _____" rather than any personal experience. The two times it happened, it resulted in ejections and bans and made headlines, and if you do a search for any other team you're going to find an equal or larger rate of shit like that. Everyone else is just echoing "what they've heard" about Boston being some egregiously racist environment. And I'm sorry, Lebron, but Boston fans wearing a "Fuck LBJ" tshirt does not make them "racist as fuck", and even line-crossing unacceptable shit like throwing a beer doesn't, either.
So yeah, I'll say I think the likeliest explanation is: Draymond is
just mad that the Garden was chanting "Fuck you Draymond", as was
his wife, and he wanted to take it to another level to generate some sympathy.