The morose Celtics squad sat in a bus parked behind the Vivint Smart Home Arena. There was little talking, and certainly no joking or laughing. Most players were looking at their phones or had headphones on, zoning out to their choice of music. Everybody just wanted to get to the airport, get on the plane, and forget that the last game had ever happened.
A voice in the back asked loudly, “Hey, where’s Gordon? Anybody see that dude?”
This prompted a few players to look around the bus in search of their teammate. When he didn’t announce himself and couldn’t be seen, that same voice announced, “Somebody go find him. He’s probably still signing autographs.”
This drew a few chuckles from the Celtics players who were listening. They all knew how Gordon had been received in Utah.
“I’ll go find him,” Terry Rozier said when there were no immediate volunteers. He ran off the bus and jogged back to the visitor’s locker room, knowing that there was no way Gordon would be interacting with fans. When he entered the locker room, it was dim and quiet, but there was one sound that could be heard:
A shower was running.
Walking towards the shower area, Terry called out, “Yo Gordon, you still crying in here? The bus is leaving soon.” He stuck his face around the corner to rib his teammate some more, but when he saw what was in front of him, his desire to joke was quickly snuffed.
Gordon was indeed in there with the shower running over his naked body. What was unexpected, however, was the presence of a fully-clothed Joe Ingles embracing his nude ex-teammate. They were both looking as startled as Terry himself felt.
“Whoa. Sorry. I’ll, uh, just leave now,” Terry stammered, forgetting the purpose of his quest quickly walking away from the scene.
—
“I thought you were bringing Gordon back with you,” Brad Stevens said as Terry climbed up the stairs of the team bus.
“Couldn’t find him,” Terry said simply. “No idea where he is.” When the image of the two players’ semi-clothed rendezvous returned unbidden to his mind, he added, “And don’t bother going in to look. I searched the whole locker room and everything. But he’s a big boy, he can get his own flight.” He sat back in his seat, put on his headphones, and tried not to think about whether or not Joe Ingles still had, at that very moment, all his clothes on.