Should the Boston Celtics take point guard Nolan Traore in the 2025 NBA draft?
Should the Boston Celtics take point guard Nolan Traore in the 2025 NBA draft? The French floor general flashes high upside, but at present is not a great defender or shooter, even if his passing is at a very high level for a prospect who is playing in a high-level league at just 19 years old.
Standing 6-foot-3 and weighing in at 175 lbs., Traore is a little slight for the 1 even if he has enough height for the position at the NBA level, and logged 7.4 assists per game with LNB Pro A's Saint Quentin last season. Is he the sort of prospect it would be worth it for the Celtics to gamble on if he falls to Boston's range at Nos. 28 or 32?
The hosts of the CLNS Media "How Bout Them Celtics!" podcast, Jack Simone and Sam LaFrance, took some time on a recent episode of their show to talk it over. Check it out below!
If you enjoy this pod, check out the "How Bout Them Celtics," "First to the Floor," and the many other New England sports podcasts available on the CLNS Media network: https://ytubl.ink/3Ffk
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So when they got to the waning moments of Game 7, the expectation of their success warred against the obvious. Their beautiful game had been reduced to a brutal grind. Their demeanor marred with fatigue. Their starting center knocked out with injury. Their starting point guard hurting. Their resolve wilting against a LeBron James-led revolt against the odds. Still, against reason, the Warriors were going to win. Because that's what they did. Always. This was the pervasive thinking as Kyrie Irving got the switch into Curry and side-stepped into a 3 from the right wing. It wasn't until it splashed with 53 seconds remaining — breaking a three-minute, 46-second scoring drought fueled by perhaps the most intense display of competitive resolve from two teams in Finals history — that the aura of Warriors inevitability cracked wide open. They could really lose. 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For those of us who were from northeast Ohio, maybe even Akron, there of course was a streak of sentimentality to have been there for LeBron's crowning achievement, and for someone, literally anyone, to break the decades-long curse of Cleveland's sports teams. But if you were there, for work, and not from Ohio, with no nativist connection to LeBron or to the team, the bus ride across the bridge was still a necessary moment of reflection for what you'd just witnessed. — Joe Vardon David Aldridge is a senior columnist for The Athletic. For 2016's Game 7, Aldridge covered the contest for and Turner Sports. The undercurrents of the 2016 finals flowed below the surface of Warriors-Cavs like an Atlantic riptide. They crashed over the shoals in Game 7. There was LeBron James, a kid from Akron raised by a single mother, whose family bounced from place to place as he grew up, achingly poor, not knowing where they'd call home in a few weeks or months. 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So when they started regularly meeting in the finals, there was not just a championship on the line. There was an unspoken gauntlet laid down: Who's running this s— in the NBA? Me or you? Sure, James had famously gone to watch Curry while the latter started to become a star in college. But this was the pros. The big show. Alpha-Alpha stuff. The competition/animosity was real, even though Curry didn't bear any public ill will toward James, he nonetheless wanted to knock his head off when they squared off. And James, of course, didn't share any bonhomie toward Curry. 'I got a text today from someone in Chicago who said, 'The whole city of Chicago is pulling for 'Bron,'' James' agent, Rich Paul, said the night of Game 7. 'And that has nothing to do with the Bulls. But it has everything to do with where we come from.' The 73-9 Warriors were well on their way to becoming the greatest single-season team of all time when Draymond Green, inexplicably, elbowed James in the groin in the last minutes of a 108-97 win in Game 4, which put Golden State up 3-1. Green was called for a flagrant foul, triggering an automatic one-game suspension for accumulated flagrant points during the playoffs. Advertisement That was the opening James needed. Cleveland came roaring back, beating the Warriors in Game 5 in Oakland, and routing them in Game 6 in Cleveland — a game punctuated by James blocking Curry's layup out of bounds in the waning minutes, and then snarling at him afterward. Hell yeah, it was personal. So Game 7, back in the Bay, had a lot more than a championship on the line. And James responded, with a triple-double and another iconic block, his chasedown of Iguodala in the last two minutes. The Cavaliers became the first team in NBA history to come back from a 3-1 deficit to win the championship. James delivered the title that Cleveland fans had been waiting 52 years to celebrate. He got his get-back from losing to the Warriors in the finals the year before. And he beat Stephen Curry to do it. 'He's the best player on his team every time they get (to the finals),' the Cavaliers' general manager David Griffin said. 'It's amazing how willing he is to sacrifice anything to win.' Triple revenge, served ice cold. 'People in Northeast Ohio, it's really like you have to work for everything you have,' Paul said. 'And there's no Fifth Avenue. There's no beach. It's a grind, grind, grind city. And a lot of people wake up with the mindset of, I can't. People wake up saying, 'I can't.' So if you're eating 'I can't' for breakfast, how can you be successful?' In the intervening years, as they aged and understood they had a lot more in common than what separated them, James and Curry have come to like each other very much, the same way that Magic Johnson and Larry Bird came to a place of respect and mutual admiration as their careers came toward the end. James pushed for Curry to be on the 2024 Olympic team; what developed in France was a 'total bromance' between the two former adversaries. 'We are not enemies, but friends,' Abraham Lincoln said in his first inaugural address. 'We must not be enemies.' — David Aldridge
