After Cryptic Tweet, Terry Rozier Insists He Doesn’t Want to Get Traded

Earlier this morning, Boston Celtics guard Terry Rozier fired off a cryptic tweet in reference to the team’s recent struggles.

The Celtics came into the season expecting to dominate the Eastern Conference, but so far haven’t quite lived up to their own expectations. They’re off to a rough start by normal standards–but relative to last season’s ECF run (even without Gordon Hayward and Kyrie Irving), their performance so far is one of the most disappointing in the league.

Rozier himself was a key component in the young team’s impressive playoff run late last season. Players like him, then-rookie Jayson Tatum, and Jaylen Brown were stellar and shocked the league with how they were able to lift the injury-plagued team to the top of the Eastern Conference.

Now, though, things have changed. The team–though it retains much of last year’s talent–is going through some growing pains as some of last year’s late-season stars have been forced to take on a diminished role with the returns of Hayward and Irving. It hasn’t been clicking, and the team that was expected to dominate the East now sits dejectedly at 7th place.

Frustration has been mounting, and head coach Brad Stevens is grasping at straws to get the franchise back on track. Gordon Hayward accepted a bench role for the first time since 2013 last night, but the Celtics were still bested by Kemba Walker and the Charlotte Hornets. The team and their fans are in panic mode now, and Rozier’s cryptic tweet was just fuel for the fire.

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Rozier Backtracks, But Doesn’t Clarify

Rozier received backlash for the tweet as some fans assumed he was underhandedly requesting a trade. So an hour later he followed up with this:

“I wasn’t talking about me,” he said in the tweet. “Chill with the bad talk.”

So he wasn’t talking about himself, but he was talking about someone. If Hayward hadn’t come off the bench last night it would be easy to assume he was talking about the former All-Star finally taking that role for the betterment of the team at large. But Hayward did come off the bench, and still nothing changed.

It’s not clear who Rozier is talking about, but he’s right that something’s gotta give if the team wants to have any chance of taking the Eastern Conference in the way they’d expected.

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