Bradley Beal was unabashed in his claim that his 2016-17 Washington Wizards could’ve beat that season’s Cleveland Cavaliers. He said this during his appearance on Theo Pinson’s Run Your Race podcast. Unfortunately for Beal, former Boston Celtic, Jae Crowder, doesn’t believe this to be the case in the slightest.
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Beal said, “The 2017 was the best Wizards team I probably was on. Me, John [Wall], Otto [Porter], Kelly [Oubre], Markieff [Morris]…We had [Bojan] Bogdanovic, we were loaded, man. We talk about that all the time. The Cleveland dudes, they were like, ‘Man, y’all lost…’ We felt like we would’ve gave them a better matchup than Boston.”
Crowder was a part of the Boston lineup from 2014-2017. When the clip of Beal from the podcast made its way to his timeline, the former Celtic responded to it with a facepalm and a laughing emoji. It’s a clear indication that Crowder doesn’t think that the Wizards could’ve beaten the Cavs that year.
— JAE CROWDER (@CJC9BOSS) October 8, 2024
In all fairness to Bradley, that Wizards squad was one of the best teams ever assembled in the franchise’s history. They finished fourth in the Eastern Conference and had a decent playoff run as well. The Wizards reached the Conference Semifinals where they ended up losing to the Boston Celtics in a thrilling seven-game series.
Both squads were heavy on guard play with the Wizards being led by an All-Star caliber backcourt of John Wall and Bradley Beal and the Celtics featuring one of the greatest small guard seasons of all time from Isaiah Thomas. Of course, the Celts were a deeper team than Washington and Crowder especially had a solid series, dropping 24 in Game 1 and going 7-12 from the field in Game 7.
The claim that the Wizards could’ve beaten the Cavs initially came from John Wall. Now Beal has co-signed on that claim as well. It goes on to show that the Wizards teammates were full of confidence about beating them, but they couldn’t get past the Celtics.
John Wall’s Wizards could’ve beaten “the sh*t out of Bron”
During his appearance on the podcast, Wall was asked about the best team that he has been a part of. Without any hesitation, he stated that the 2017 Wizards team was the best in his opinion. Before he could get a follow-up question on that, the five-time All-Star doubled down on it by claiming that he could’ve easily beaten LeBron James’ Cavs.
He said, “We was gonna beat the sh*t out of Bron. I’m telling you, if you do an interview with anybody from the Cavs, there was one team that they did not want to see in the East. They did not want to see us.”
Wall boasted about the depth of his team and how they had the appropriate matchups for every player on the Cavs team. If they didn’t lose to Boston in seven games, we could’ve had this debate settled a long time ago.
