Et is a night scene in a nameless city. Where you meet in the evenings to go skateboarding in a neon-cold atmosphere made of concrete and graffiti. The man in the center of the image montage is wearing a cap and a dark t-shirt and is moving around the board in his red Puma shoes. He shows kickflips and risky jumps over knee-high obstacles.
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He uploaded the short video with his demonstrations to the social media platform Instagram on Monday, where more than 85,000 curious people clicked on the little heart to show their sympathy. No wonder: Dennis Schröder has almost two million fans in this part of the universe.
The performance should also have reached the decision-makers of the Boston Celtics, who reportedly spoke to the management of the 27-year-old basketball professional a few days ago about the contours of a new contract and have now apparently reached an agreement.
Contract with Boston Celtics
In any case, Schröder wrote on Tuesday (local time) in his Instagram story he was “proud” and it would be “an honor to put on the green and white and do what I love”. According to the information, he agreed on a contract for the coming season, an official confirmation by the Celtics was initially pending.
The Brunswick man has never made a secret of his passion for skateboarding since he entered the best basketball league in the world in 2013. On the contrary. When the American trade magazine Slam quoted Klay Thompson from the Golden State Warriors two years ago, who claimed he was “probably the best NBA player on skateboards”, Schröder posted several videos of himself on the net. Connected with the provocative request to the master player to show what he can do. Preferably at a joint meeting. Obviously Schröder had ignored what Thompson had said in the same breath: “I am contractually obliged not to skate anymore.”
It’s good if you stick to such requirements in American team sport, because a little later Thompson extended the Warriors by five years for a guaranteed salary of 189 million dollars. So he didn’t have to worry economically when, barely recovering from a cruciate ligament injury, he tore his Achilles tendon at the end of 2020 and failed again. Schröder can currently only dream of protection on such dimensions. He was without a contract until the end after he had rejected an offer from the Los Angeles Lakers a few months ago, with which the franchise wanted to bind him to itself for several years.
The offer – limited to $ 84 million by the league’s collective agreement provisions – was too low for him. Schröder, who played for the Atlanta Hawks, Oklahoma City Thunder and Lakers in the NBA, believed he could get a lot more out of the player market. “It’s just one thing, I want to feel it, I want to find out how it is,” he told German journalists in the spring.
Now he knows. The experience is likely to be quite expensive. After the early out of the Lakers in the play-offs at the beginning of June, in which he could not meet expectations, not only his old team lost interest in him. Every other club with a vacancy in the playmaker’s position suddenly seemed interested in solutions without him. A chorus of scornful voices rang out on social media.
Especially since other basketball professionals were able to showcase their skills in the Olympic tournament in Tokyo, while Schröder, who mimed the lead wolf of the German team at the botched World Cup 2019 in China, was missing. He had given the German Basketball Federation an impossible task: the association managers should find (and pay) insurance that would cover a phantom salary of more than $ 100 million from a non-existent employment contract in the event that the player was wearing the national jersey career-endangering injured.
When the league’s time window for contract negotiations opened at the beginning of August, it became clear what the free player market in the NBA has in store for professionals who gamble away with self-confident sporting and financial demands: the free fall. Especially when they have such high standards as Schröder. He wanted to earn more than the $ 17.5 million he had received per season over the past four years. He also claims a leadership role on the pitch. And preferably with a team that has a chance of winning the championship.
A few weeks ago there were clubs with deep pockets that might even have accepted such requests. In between, Schröder was associated with the Chicago Bulls and the New York Knicks. But by now all aspirants had reassembled their cadres without him. Now, for Schröder, at most stopgap solutions and compromise solutions remained, such as a one-year contract with the Boston Celtics with a salary well below his expectations.
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