The 2020-21 regular season is over, and I think I speak for a lot of us when I say ... good riddance.
That’s not actually what I wanted to say, but I cleaned it up for public consumption.
It is so completely fitting that the Boston Celtics ended up a .500 team because they’ve been overwhelmingly average all season long. Every great win is counterbalanced by a devastating loss. For every day we’ve felt good about them, there are many others that have us reaching for the Pepto.
Brad Stevens is still mired in the muck as he prepares for a new wrinkle, a play-in tournament game, so he hasn’t been able to put much thought into how happy he is to be done with this year. But he has some ideas.
“I think we’ll reflect, certainly, on the challenges of the regular season, but listen this has been really hard,” Stevens said after the season-ending loss to the Knicks. “We have not been perfect. That’s been well-documented. We’ve dealt with a lot of negativity, and we’ve stayed together. I think that’s the most important thing you can do. We have to just stay together and reset now.”
Reset.
That’s such an interesting concept for this team because it suggests the possibility of putting everything we’ve seen behind them, and being something different. That on the surface, seems asinine.
We have 72 games worth of evidence that suggests who this team is. Occam’s Razor tells us the simplest answer to the question is usually the best one, and the simplest way to describe this team is “average.” They’re good enough to beat the good teams, but not good enough to live in their area code. They’re bad enough to lose to bad teams, but not so bad that they have a cot in the cellar.
This is the trap of averageness, though. When things average out, that means there is usually “great” and “horrible” bookending the mediocrity. We latch onto the great as the basis for optimism and find a few “if only” statements to package around it to make a cogent argument for being upbeat.
The Celtics are full of “if only” this and thats. And each one had its legitimacy, which once again brings us to the question of “who can these guys be” versus “who will these guys be.”
“I like the guys in the room. There's going to be a lot more required of our best players and it's a challenge they're going to have to step up to,” Stevens recently said. “We've been here before when some of our best players aren't available and you head into the postseason and we'll see where we land and we'll see what happens. But we have enough in the room to be a nuisance.”
The nuisance part of that statement is legit. The losses to the Miami Heat ended any hopes of making today’s game significant, so Kemba Walker and Marcus Smart got a week-long vacation. Robert Williams rested his turf toe rather than try to push through it. Jayson Tatum and Evan Fournier got an extra day off. They won’t have Jaylen Brown, but they have enough to accomplish that goal.
But they’ve had enough to accomplish a lot of goals that they didn’t achieve this season. Why should we believe in a reset at this point?
“We’ll be prepared. I have no doubt about that,” Stevens said. “The key is how we come into practice tomorrow, our mentality as we prepare. But we’ll cover what we need to cover, and then go out and play a fast game with a clear mind. That’s what you hope to do.”
That’s what everyone has hoped they’d do all season long. They’ve given us bits and pieces, but never more than that.
Who can these guys be in the playoffs? Who will they be?
They have a chance to crack open a window and show us that the circumstances of this season were just too great to overcome, and they can do it by being that nuisance. They can actually reset.
But will they?
“(We have to) get ready with great preparation tomorrow and play our best that we’ve played this year this week. That’s the old Belichick saying: ‘Play your best when your best is needed.’ It’s needed now,” Stevens said. “It doesn’t mean we’re going to be perfect, doesn’t mean we’re not going to make mistakes, but we just need to put in a good day of prep, get ready to roll, and play as well as we can.”