Sometimes, you just need a win.
Whether it’s in life when you’ve had a few bad days in a row, or if you’re the Boston Celtics and the end of your regular season has come crashing down, something finally going right for you can lift a big weight off your chest.
And so it was with that in mind that Brad Stevens summoned his two remaining relatively healthy stars to return to a game that had no impact on anything other than their human psyche.
“Held my breath a little bit the whole time,” Stevens said of Jayson Tatum and Evan Fournier’s return to the floor mid-way through the fourth quarter. The terrible luck of this season weighed on everyone as they watched, waiting for karma to bite Boston for this decision. But aside from a bump to Tatum’s head from Jarred Vanderbilt, the Celtics survived.
“That was kind of the reason I wanted to play,” Tatum said after the 124-108 win. “Just to kind of get in a rhythm and kind of just feel good about ourselves and have a game where we just felt like we played well regardless of the outcome.”
It’s hard for people to fully comprehend how important confidence is in sports. It is one of the most important intangibles for any team or player. When confidence wavers, the entire Jenga tower can come crashing down. Shooters fall into funks, defenders get torched, and teammates start sniping.
It takes supreme confidence to play at the professional level, but even the best of the best have moments where they throw their hands up, look to the sky, and ask the heavens “what do I need to do to catch a break?” As failures compound themselves, teams and players find more of their mental energy wrapped up in what’s going wrong, and not how to get things right.
“It's about playing the right way, playing with confidence, and executing well,” Fournier said. “It’s always important to play well. Always. Doesn't matter who you’re playing against, what the circumstances are. You want to go out there and play your brand of basketball.”
This year has been full of Kirkland brand Celtics basketball. It looks like the Celtics, but we’ve gotten too much of something that hasn’t been quite right. Stevens has been pushing and hoping for some top-shelf, premium basketball, and we all know the Celtics are capable of it from time to time, but we’ve yet to see it consistently.
It’s bothersome, but not just to us. To them, too. Tatum and Fournier had the option of sitting the game out, but they chose to play in an effort to at least cleanse their palates a bit
“It’s been such an up-and-down season. Obviously, last couple of games haven’t gone our way. I just felt like this was a good opportunity,” Tatum said. “I knew that we had a lot of guys that weren’t able to play, so that a lot of the other guys would get an opportunity. So just to come out there, kind of play with different groups and different lineups, have everybody get an opportunity and just a chance to play well.”
It may feel meaningless, and it ultimately actually might be in the grand scheme of things. But we don’t know what tomorrow will bring for these guys. No one is expecting much anymore. They’ve earned this spot in the play-in tournament and a first round matchup against one of the three best teams in the conference. If they get swept, they will have earned that too. No one is pretending that this is some springboard to any miraculous run.
This about this moment; this snapshot in time. This is about a team that’s been through a lot this season, for a variety of reasons, needing to go to sleep with a little bit less of a headache. This was about getting a sliver of that confidence back, then seeing what tomorrow will bring.
“People can say games don't mean as much, whatever the case may be. We needed to feel good,” Stevens said. “I thought it was really important when we step on this plane today to feel a little bit better going in with the right mentality; taking what we talked about in practice yesterday about paying the right way defensively and offensively together and finishing the game. So I put them in to finish the game. That's why they went in ... and we made it out, so that's good.”