One of the reasons we love sports is that they take away a lot of the grey area in life. One team wins, one team loses, both move on to the next game (unless it’s soccer, I guess). We get to immerse ourselves very deeply knowing, by the end, there will be a resolution. We’ll either be happy, angry, or a little sad for a little while, and then we get to do it all over again.
These lines of delineation differ greatly from our day-to-day world, where any number of different factors blur the lines between success and failure. But sometimes those blurred lines spill into our judgment of the guys we watch.
By just about every measure, this Boston Celtics season has been some level of failure. They didn’t win as many games as they probably should have, and they’ve looked so bad, so often, that there is a prevailing thought amongst a fair amount of fans that Brad Stevens has lost the team.
Stevens begs to differ.
“I give our guys a ton of credit,” he said after the Celtics dispatched the Washington Wizards, and before the court was cleared for the Bruins to do the same to the Caps. “It has not always been roses, right? And they've had to answer a lot of stuff, and it's been hard missing people all year. And our guys have just stayed with it, and they've just stuck together, and if they wouldn't have, you wouldn't have seen them play the way they did.”
Stevens is desperate to find rays of sunshine breaking through the clouds. At the beginning of the season, most people thought Boston had a puncher’s chance to come away as champions, now it seems that the best they can hope for is to be Chuck Wepner to Brooklyn’s Muhammad Ali.
“We’ve been through a lot, so we’re hardened in a lot of ways,” Stevens said. “We’ve been backs against the wall most of the year, and to have to play to get into the playoffs, just to earn the right to play the most talented team that’s been assembled since I’ve been in the NBA - it takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of togetherness, and it takes staying together through tougher times.
“We’ll start getting ready for Brooklyn when we get back together on Thursday. We know that challenge. Those guys are the best of the best. Going into that I’m a fan - a general fan of the NBA - and I have a hard time seeing them lose, so we’re going to have to play great, we’re going to have to play great together, and be really sound on both ends of the floor.”
Wepner lost that fight against Ali, but he did that knockdown in the ninth round. Ali demolished him after that, but Wepner was the inspiration for Rocky. Wepner’s legend grew, even though he looked like a marionette in the hands of a drunk puppet master by the end.
Stevens is looking for that same recognition for his team. The view of the team from the outside is very clearly different from the view they have of themselves. While we all pick at the carcass of a season declared dead weeks ago, the Celtics are suddenly feeling themselves a little bit.
It’s like the “bring out your dead” scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the old man draped over John Cleese’s shoulder suddenly springs to life and declares he’s feeling better. Most of us are fully prepared to swing the club and put an end to all this, but the Celtics aren’t ready to declare anything over.
“I think we still have expectations, but regardless of what people think ... we believe in ourselves,” Jayson Tatum said. “We know the season isn’t over with. We know it hasn’t necessarily been ideal, but we still have the utmost confidence in each and every guy in that locker room and what we’re capable of as a unit.”
Maybe it’s the misguided confidence that comes along with the ego necessary to even compete at this level, or a sell job by Stevens on his players that he hopes can act as a carrot to lead guys through a pivotal summer. But the way you think about this team and they think about themselves is not really the same. You see dead men walking, they see what Wepner saw. They see a chance.
“We've said all year, I mean, our only chance was to get healthy at the right time,” Stevens said. “We're not because Jaylen (Brown) is obviously out. But if we can get (Robert Williams) back, if we can get a good couple days of prep, then again, it will be a fun challenge to go up against the best.”