The Boston Celtics regular season comes to an end on Sunday afternoon. I am, at the same time, happy to see it go and sad to see it leave. Here are a couple of random thoughts about what we’ve seen.
This has not been a fun season for anyone
Let me start by saying this: please don’t take this as a “woe is me” type of thing. I’m quite happy to be employed and talking about sports during this pandemic. I fully understand how lucky I am in the grand scheme of things.
From a media perspective, it’s been impossible to cover the team properly from afar through zoom calls. We don’t get to see practices, or at least the normal post-practice shooting the players do, to get a sense of who’s with whom and what they’re trying to accomplish. We don’t get to see human dynamics at play that guide us towards questions or storylines.
That has made it difficult to figure out what’s real and what’s not this season. I can’t look into someone’s eyes, ask follow ups, get pushback, or privately ask players and coaches anything. Sports media has essentially been reduced to more blogging and opinions and less reporting beyond what we’re told in Zoom calls.
That human interaction is important. A lot of context is lost through the internet. You’re reading this site and others because you’re interested in these teams and players and this filter is removing a lot of things that are important to the whole story.
And so it’s almost impossible for any of us to answer the most critical question of this season: how much of this is real, and how much of this is a product of circumstance.
We can argue each side until our keyboards fall apart, but neither of us really knows how true our statements are without being in that locker room.
For example, why is Grant Wiliams having such an up-and-down season?
There are a few of you who read that question and either thought to yourself, or maybe even said out loud, “because he sucks.”
There are others, and I'm in this camp, who believe the circumstances have done him no favors. He had no chance to grow as a player in the offseason and the construction of this team put him in tough positions where he never could adapt.
Who’s right? It’s hard to say. Different perspectives lead to different conclusions. One side points to him playing poorly on the floor and says “look at him. He’s not good.” The other side points to good stretches and says “look at him. He can be good.”
I’m personally not willing to write off a second-year player whose first two seasons were severely impacted by a pandemic. However, there is little room in the NBA for sympathy. The league might be weird this year and we can make all the points about the short turnaround and the pandemic that we want, but the fact is contracts are contracts, the salary cap and tax rules are unwavering, and the team still has to press forward under that governance.
So where’s that line between making necessary changes to this team and not overreacting to the circumstances? Is it Marcus Smart? Is it Brad Stevens?
I think moving Smart just to move him is an overreaction. So is firing Stevens. Danny Ainge agrees.
“I don't think anybody's head needs to roll,” he said on 98.5’s Toucher & Rich this morning. “I'm saying I blame everybody and I'm saying everybody is guilty of both of those -- of playing great and the good games and bad in the bad games. It's a collective team.”
More specifically about Stevens, Ainge said “I've been in professional sports for over 40 years. Of course I understand why you guys point at Brad Stevens, or people that aren’t paying attention to the team point at Brad Stevens, but I'm there every day. And that's the least of our worries.”
He’s right about this being a collective, and everyone from Wyc Grousbeck to Tacko Fall has a stake in the failures, but where do we go from here?
Something has to change. Whether it’s big or small, something will be different about next year’s team, partly because something is always different from year to year. But whatever it is, Ainge just has to be careful not to overreact, because doing so could be a bigger setback than doing nothing at all.
Cleveland Championship → Kyrie Irving → Tristan Thompson → Celtics struggles?
A thought popped into my head yesterday, and because that so rarely happens I was forced to explore it further.
The two most disappointing seasons in Brad Stevens’ tenure have had one similarity: each was led by a player who won a championship with LeBron James at a young age.
Kyrie Irving was 23 and Tristan Thompson was 24, each in their fifth seasons, when the Cavs won their title. LeBron was in his 13th season.
The Cavs went to the NBA Finals the following two seasons as the second and fourth seeds respectively. Irving and Thompson watched LeBron James manage himself and his body to make sure he was right for the playoffs.
So both came to Boston with a similar mentality, which was basically that the regular season didn’t quite matter and that whatever noise or issues that exist can be wiped away come playoff time.
Here’s what Irving said on March 9, 2019:
“The only thing that matters is hitting your stride at the right time. I think we’re all waiting for the stride to be hit for us, especially going on the road, playing against high-level teams, and being successful. We just gotta take care of that and just continue to build the continuity that we need, and the trust. Around this time is around the time we want to get going and just feel good about your team and going into the playoffs.”
And here’s Thompson last month:
“The first thing I would say is that winning games in a regular season to me, they matter, but I really think it's a bunch of (crap) because I've been on teams, you know, my final good year in Cleveland, we finished fourth. And we kind of did it on purpose because we kind of wanted to stay fresh.”
Neither of them came to Boston feeling the regular season was overly important, mostly because they watched LeBron freaking James handle his business after cruising to some degree in the regular season.
And so it actually should come as no surprise that the Celtics, themselves trying to find a way to stay fresh, would devalue regular season games in exchange for building up their health.
If Thompson was so bold as to say that to the media in April, then there is no doubt he was relaying that message in the locker room. When you think back to how many games in which Boston seemed to coast and then try to turn it on late, this middle finger to the regular season starts to make more and more sense.
However, there’s one glaring problem by transferring that Cleveland approach to Boston:
THERE IS NO LEBRON JAMES ON THIS ROSTER!
And I think this is at the heart of the leadership from those two guys in particular, and why there is a similar thread between the two teams. They learned that something worked at one place, but they didn’t take into account that the reason it probably worked was because it involved an alien robot not bound by earthly laws.
Of course, that doesn’t absolve the rest of the team if they followed advice that has clearly not gone well the first time. It doesn’t change the fact that even if they thought it would work, at some point they should come to the conclusion that “hey, this doesn't seem to be going well.”
There are probably dozens of reasons for everything that happened this season, some in their control, some out. I do find it very interesting, though, that the two bizarre years in this current Celtics run have come while having leaders from that Cavs championship team.
I tried to articulate that point on the Locked On Celtics podcast. You can listen to that if you’d like: