CHARLESTON -- Every team has a chance. Technically speaking, any team could win the NBA Championship this season. Any team could make the playoffs. Any team could take a major jump.
That's why everyone is happy during training camp. Barring disaster, teams should be eager. Excited to see what the new campaign can bring them.
So, can vibes really be the story? Can that be the big takeaway from training camp every year? In some cases, yes. But for the most part, of course players and coaches are going to say that they're thrilled about the upcoming season.
"Every team in the league is the most together team right now because we haven't traveled, no one's gotten benched, no one's been on a losing streak, no one's gotten blamed in the media, no one's had to go stand in the corner for 10 minutes and not get the ball," Joe Mazzulla said earlier in the week. "So you learn those things as the season goes on, and you learn how to work through those things together. And you can't simulate those. It just comes with time.
"And so, right now I would say all 30 teams feel great about themselves, and we got to wait till adversity hits. And adversity is even a strong word. I mean, there's nothing really adverse about playing in the NBA. But we got to wait till stuff doesn't go your way, and then, we got to figure out who we are and how we're going to be at our best."
Nobody has dealt with any failures. Any blips. The closest thing to a bump in the road a team could possibly deal with in the preseason is an injury. And those do happen. But outside of that, the wins, losses, and every tough decision in between have to wait.
Training camp is for camaraderie. Getting to know your new (and old) teammates. Figuring out what could possible work on the court, even though there's no true way to test it until the regular season.
"There isn't an objective that you just check it off the list and never go back to it," Mazzulla said on Tuesday morning in Charleston. "You're trying to build certain things in training camp that you can then pull from and go back to in those moments, and then, like I kind of said in that quote, there's always things that come up over the course of the season that are either going to bring you closer as a team or bring you further apart as a team, and so you just got to be ready to handle those things as a team and work on those throughout the season."
That doesn't mean the Celtics aren't going to try. Of course they are. It wouldn't be a Mazzulla basketball team if they didn't.
In the past, the Celtics have blared crowd noise throughout practices. They've mimicked the sound effects of TD Garden. They've even played gunfire over the loudspeakers. Anything to put pressure on the players.
Predicting the future is impossible, no matter how hard you try. You can't foreshadow the road ahead. But you can be prepared to react. You can simulate stress.
"I think you try to. I think you try to create moments of stress throughout training camp," Mazzulla said. "Whether it's in the scrimmaging, whether it's in certain situations. We definitely try to actively work on those beforehand, but at the same time, you can't simulate those things four or five months from now."
Perhaps the Celtics have been including some