“Sometimes you end up on the defeated side of the endeavor.”
Luke Kornet hilariously breaks down Quentin Grimes’ poster with Abby Chin
The Dallas Mavericks fell to the Boston Celtics in a 2024 NBA Finals rematch Saturday at the American Airlines Center, but Mavs guard Quentin Grimes did produce one of the best dunks of the season.
And unfortunately for Celtics backup center Luke Kornet, it came at his expense.
Grimes posterized Kornet with a thunderous one-handed slam in the final 30 seconds of the third quarter. The dunk brought the crowd, and the Mavericks bench, to their feet.
It was actually the NBA’s highest-graded dunk of the season so far.
What does Kornet think of the dunk and its high score? He responded with typical Kornet humor during an exclusive interview with NBC Sports Boston’s Abby Chin.
“Obviously, dunk score is a very crucial element to our game,” Kornet said with a smile, as seen in the video player above.
“What do I think (of the dunk)? You know, they say humility is the virtue of knowing God is the author of all good things, and he made Quentin Grimes well. Because that boy — he’s got some quick twitch, as they say. Frankly, when someone has an opportunity to display their athleticism, it’s on me to try to combat that, and sometimes you end up on the defeated side of the endeavor and you have to willfully accept it.
So kudos to him. It was a great jump, great dunk.”
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The Celtics were still up by 20 points after the dunk, but Kornet isn’t the type of person to respond by pointing to the scoreboard.
“Yeah, but the thing is, you don’t want to kind of go the whole ‘scoreboard’ route because then it undermines like, hey, no, that happened. You don’t want to try to back out of it,” Kornet explained. “You accept the things that happen.”
Kornet deserves credit for at least challenging the dunk. A lot of players in his situation would have made what is commonly referred to as a “business decision” and just let Grimes dunk without any resistance.
“The business decision is always to do the thing that you think helps the other team score less and your team score more,” Kornet said. “I was a little late on that one, which happens. And then he got to my body before I was able to kind of get to his, which was sort of the problem.
“I mean, you can break it down in a lot of ways. The dunk score obviously shows all this.”
Kornet played well against the Mavericks with two points, five assists and a team-high 10 rebounds during the Celtics’ 122-107 win in Dallas.
Next up for the Celtics is a matchup with the Rockets on Monday night at TD Garden. The C’s beat the Rockets in Houston on Jan. 3. Tip-off is set for 7:30 p.m. ET on NBC Sports Boston.
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