Kristaps Porzingis ready to give Celtics 'high-level years' - ESPN

BOSTON — When Kristaps Porzingis finally fell asleep around 4 a.m. last Thursday morning, he still wasn't sure whether a trade to the Boston Celtics was going to take place.

The initial three-team deal Porzingis had believed would bring him to Boston involving the LA Clippers had fallen through. And, eventually, he decided he simply had to go to bed and leave his fate for the morning.

«It was a crazy day for me,» Porzingis, seated between Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla and president of basketball operations Brad Stevens on a stage on the Auerbach Center practice court Thursday afternoon, said with a broad smile. «I was about to go to sleep, and then I heard the news that the trade didn't go through, so that kept me up for a little bit longer.

»But then by like 4 a.m. back home, I was like, 'OK, I'll go to sleep and see what happens.'"

What happened, it turned out, was that the deal did, in fact, get done, and Porzingis found his way to the Celtics in a three-team deal with the Memphis Grizzlies and his former team, the Washington Wizards.

"[When I woke] up in the morning, I saw that it happened, the trade happened," Porzingis said, «and I was just extremely excited and extremely happy.»

Those two words — «excited» and «happy» — came up an awful lot during Porzingis' roughly 20-minute news conference Thursday. After spending the first eight years of his NBA career playing in a combined 10 playoff games — and never getting out of the first round — Porzingis made it clear he was thrilled about the prospect of joining a contender.

"[It was] an opportunity to play for a really good team already and be able to add to that," Porzingis said, when asked what went into his decision to pick up his $36 million player option to