PLYMOUTH — Al Horford played the first nine seasons of his career in Atlanta before arriving in Boston during the summer of 2016. Gordon Hayward had eight seasons in Utah before heading East in the summer of 2017. This fall, Kemba Walker will follow suit after being a lifelong Hornet (eight seasons) to debut in Celtics green. The buzz around the point guard is measurable after an All-Star campaign and strong individual performances in the FIBA World Cup, but the team will be taking it slow with him after he sat out the final game of the tournament with a sore neck.
"Kemba is here," Brad Stevens said Monday at the Shamrock Foundation fundraiser in Plymouth. "Kemba's been here since he got back I think, so we've seen him almost every day. Last week, he did a lot less, obviously, because he was just getting worked on, but he was on the court today. I don't think he ended up playing 5-on-5 but he looks good. I think, once the season hits, he will be ready to roll."
While the clean slate of health will be a top priority for the team and player after spending three weeks on the other side of the world, the focus on the coaching staff early will be to ensure a smooth adjustment to Boston's culture both on and off the floor after Walker faces new surroundings for the first time since 2011.
"I think the biggest thing for him is even though he's an All-Star and is as good as he is, it's still a transition when you go to a new city and a new team," Stevens noted. "Those great players have a tendency to make those things look smooth but we just have to be cognizant as a staff of that."
The Celtics have had plenty of experience of trying to integrate top talent into their culture in recent years and it's occurred with mixed success. Al Horford and his teammates struggled in the first half of his 2016-17 campaign in Boston (14-12 start) before turning the corner in December and surprising everyone with a trip to the Eastern Conference Finals. Hayward clearly didn't have a chance to integrate himself in year one on the heels of an ankle injury and had a rollercoaster season in his first true campaign in Boston during the 2018-19 season.
I asked Stevens on Monday how much the team would be able to learn from those experiences bringing in key pieces when it came to how they handled integrating Walker into the fold.
"I think everybody's a little bit different," Stevens said. "Everybody's got their own motivations for leaving and ultimately ending up here. But all three of those guys share the similarity of they were in a good place in good programs, really had won and had impacted those places in a lot of ways and cared about all the right stuff. Not only cared about their performance on the team but in their communities.
"So I think that you know, again, we just have to be cognizant that, like, when we do a practice, it'll be as new to Kemba as it will be to Romeo Langford. Like, it's just a different deal. Now, he'll pick up things so quick because he's a 29-year-old pro, but at the same time, it's just normal that there's going to be some transition there. And our job is to help make that as easy as possible. The grunt work is using a pick and roll and figuring out how to beat three people downhill, and he does that about as well as anybody in the world."
Walker's reputation as a hard worker with a consistent attitude should help the Celtics on that journey as will a strong supporting cast in the backcourt with Marcus Smart and Jaylen Brown among others. However, the challenge is going to be stiff for Stevens and his staff to get Walker and up to eight new Celtics fully integrated with just three weeks of preseason to work with before the regular-season opener in Philadelphia.
"You can’t come to camp, like maybe in the past, where you’d come to camp to get in shape," Stevens said. "You gotta be ready to roll. I think it’s one of the benefits of the guys that played overseas because they got a lot of time, and conditioning. Then you just gotta be mentally prepared for the games to be right around the corner. Have a couple warm-up games and practice games to get our legs underneath us and then we go right into the lion’s den early. So it should be a lot of fun. I think our guys are excited to get ready and get after it."
The good news from that standpoint for Boston is that Walker and five of his teammates (Tatum, Brown, Smart, Theis, Poirier) will already be in game shape from their play in the World Cup. Others (Hayward, Rob Williams) have already been praised by the staff for the amount of work they put in. There will certainly be some growing pains for Walker and company but it won't be from a lack of effort and fitness in all likelihood. Given how ugly things started for this group last year, the emphasis on starting strong for Boston should be bigger than ever. Walker's successful integration will need to be an essential part of that process if the Celtics are going to succeed on that front.