After a regular season where he struggled to find his jumper, Duncan Robinson has been back to his sharpshooting ways for the Miami Heat during their run to the 2023 NBA Finals. Robinson’s up to 44.6 percent from behind the three-point line during the postseason, and hit double-digit scoring in five of the seven games Miami played in the Eastern Conference Finals against the Boston Celtics.
Robinson’s most notable moment in the series didn’t come after a made three. Instead, it came during Game 7 in Boston, when the New England native scored on a back cut to give the Heat a 21-point fourth quarter lead and then held his hand up to his ear, signifying that he couldn’t hear the opposing crowd. On a new episode of JJ Redick’s “The Old Man and the Three” podcast, Robinson explained why he decided to do this, and revealed that it had something to do with his phone getting blown up by Celtics fans after Game 6.
This story is pretty crazy. Celtics fans lol pic.twitter.com/P3nzXAfvs7
— Jason Gallagher (@jga41agher) May 31, 2023
Robinson said that he only wanted to do something like this if he was “relevant enough in the game to warrant that,” which led to him debating if he should do it after a back cut to get his 10th point of the game.
“But, I don’t know how this happened, but maybe somebody that I went to high school with or something — cause I still have the same number from when I was in high school,” Robinson said. “My number got put in a group chat somewhere, and it was like a massive group chat. So after we lose Game 6, my phone is blowing up from all these random New England numbers … ‘get f*cked, get f*cked, Celts in 7.’ They’re sending me memes of the Curt Schilling bloody sock, and it’s just all these random numbers, it’s like 70 texts. I’m like, ‘What is going on?’”
Robinson mentioned that all of this happened after a heartbreaking Game 6 loss in which he missed shots to help put the game away and left the door open for Boston to win on a Derrick White putback with no time remaining. All of this, Robinson says, really wound him up.
“I’m like, who the f*ck gave out my number? How the f*ck did this happen?” he says. “So then I start thinking, I’m creating all these scenarios in my head, I’m like, if I get the chance and I go into the Garden, I’m gonna do something. And I didn’t know what it was gonna be. Honestly, probably a little underwhelming, but you would be shocked at how many people that really bothered.”
Apparently, Robinson “heard from a lot of people,” many of whom really hated it for being “classless.” It is unclear if these people believe getting a stranger’s phone number and heckling them is also classless.