Maybe I'm a bad person, but I was in the opposite of mourning. Smart had been hurting the offense for awhile, and seemed to want more of a leadership voice than his performance warranted. Brogdon was a straight-up malcontent.
Losing TL sucked, because he's a great guy and a fun player, but no one had illusions about his injury situation.
I was very much on this train as well. Especially after watching basically the first preseason game.
Same. Smart had run his course. I was very excited about the trade.
After the TL/Brogdon for Holiday trade I was psyched, because I was tired of the Timelord experience (and I believe I wrote early in this thread that the Rob Williams who was a defensive superstar for several months in 2022 was never coming back) and because I wasn't all that pleased with how Brogdon had handled being in trade rumors (and Holiday seemed like an immediately obvious great fit), but prior to this trade, I believe I was at best cautiously optimistic on last summer's deals. I had probably had about enough of Smart being the leader, and I was positive right off the bat that KP (the best scoring big man Boston has had in arguably 30+ years) would be a great fit on offense, but I wasn't happy with the point guard situation, or our defense in general. It's better to be lucky than good, and Boston was extremely lucky that months after they sent Smart packing, a [better in every way] replacement became available at an affordable price.
I've wrote this before, but I'm not real happy with the way that Brogdon is remembered, here or among Boston fans generally. Up until the moment he got hurt in game 1 against Miami, he was 95% of what we needed: A reliable scorer off the bench, good enough to be the 3rd best scorer on the team and the 6th MOY. Without him, we would've lost to Philly in the ECSF. He averaged 16 points in 29 minutes while shooting 52% from 3 in that series, and he was a big reason why game 6 was still in reach as Tatum shot 1-14 in the first 3.5 quarters. Things ended badly as they often do (and Portland did him and themselves a disservice by not moving him to another contender for a 1st round pick at any point last year), but seeing how he's talked about sometimes leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
