Isaiah Thomas was the heart and soul of the Boston Celtics last year, and established himself as the team’s leader with his hard-nosed play and ability to fire up Boston fans. So it’s kind of weird to see that the team traded him to the Cleveland Cavaliers in exchange for Kyrie Irving on Tuesday night.
This is especially the case because just over a month ago, Thomas was openly trying to recruit Gordon Hayward to Boston. The main way this happened was in an emoji war with Jazz center Rudy Gobert and Heat center Hassan Whiteside. While Thomas ended up winning this battle — Hayward spurned Utah and Miami to sign with Boston — Gobert might have won the war, as evidenced by this very timely retweet after Thomas got sent to Cleveland on Tuesday night.
Now in fairness to Thomas, it’s not like he did the work to bring Hayward to Boston and then ditched him to go play with LeBron James or anything like that. It’s just a case of a thing we see all the time in sports: an old tweet coming back to haunt someone.
Having said that, someone may want to ask Thomas if he’ll tweet out a few emojis in which he articulates his thoughts on Cleveland. Also there’s approximately a 10 million percent chance that Gobert thought of retweeting this the second that news dropped about a potential Thomas-to-Cleveland deal, because the NBA is the pettiest and most wonderful sports league on earth.
