Five irresponsible predictions for this Celtics season

The NBA season starts… today! It means real Celtics basketball, real inspiration for real takes with real evidence to back real conclusions. But wait, does that mean I won’t get to make irresponsibly unsubstantiated projections about how the season is going to go anymore?! Oh god…uh, quick! Grab the keys to the nuclear codes and launch every crazy take-missile we have in reserve!

1. Jayson Tatum is going to have comfortably the best season of his career

Schematically, I have no reason to believe this. Tatum’s scoring has no reason to go up unless Jaylen Brown, Derrick White and Jrue Holiday decide to go form a Fleetwood Mac cover band until Kristaps Porzingis is back, and even in that case Payton Pritchard might just take more shots. This take is primarily based on ~positivity~.

I don’t care about nor even want to talk about what happened with Tatum during the Olympics. That is meaningless, out-of-context tomfoolery that I will not allow to invade the realm of professional NBA basketball. He didn’t play because he was honestly pretty redundant on a team with seven thousand ball-dominant scoring forwards in their swan swong, something I touched on even at the time.

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Instead of negative ridiculousness, I’d argue positivity is everywhere for Tatum this year. The creeping horror of what would happen to his career if he didn’t win a championship is now gone, and provided he has even 20 percent of the famous-person literacy I think he has, he’s able to block out the trolls that say he lacks “aura” or is some kind of phony Kobe-clone. The people who say that are either idiots, don’t even watch the NBA, or are Lakers fans like my SBNation.com editor Harrison Faigen who tries to sneak Tatum-snipes into every piece I write for him.

Without this existential pressure, Tatum should be free to experiment and build on his already incredibly robust offensive and defensive game. He’ll still say “nothing matters but holding the trophy in June,” but like… some stuff matters other than that now. He got his contract, he has his ring, so now it’s time for Tatum to evolve his greatness into things I didn’t even imagine when I wrote a gobsmackingly long profile of the guy during the All-Star break.

And if he does what I think he can, maybe I’ll write another one.

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2. Salary cap might make this weird around March

19th Century Europe has Karl Marx and historical materialism. 21st Century NBA has Bobby Marks and salary cap determinism. And I am not a salary cap determinist.

(See what I did there? Marx versus Marks? Two guys who probably believe that economics drive the wheels of history, albeit in slightly different contexts? Anyone?)

I sort of aspire to be one, but my humanities-coded brain has a really hard time believing that NBA history is just one long march of one economic calculation to the next. I’m a narrative guy, and to a lesser extent, a stat guy. To an even lesser extent, I’m an X’s and O’s guy (though you should probably ask Adam Taylor about that stuff), and to the less-est extent, I’m a salary cap guy.

And I don’t know if you guys have been seeing the apocalypse-is-coming-and-you-can’t-stop-it level projections for the Celtics’ 2026 luxury tax bill, but most of the salary cap determinists out there seem to think that Boston is going to have to sell quite a lot of their current roster for parts if they want to avoid like… opening a black hole to another dimension and inadvertently inviting a hostile alien invasion. It’s something like that.

So, while I’ll always defer to the actual salary cap-ists for this, I worry that this might get weird around March if things aren’t just absolute sunshine and rainbows in Boston. Say the Celtics are in 4th instead of 1st in the East, and every hundred-something million dollar extension that’s coming down the pipeline gives them exactly zero flexibility to fix things. People might start looking at each other and calling names.

It also might force me to start writing stuff that is titled “who should the Celtics trade this offseason to fix their cap bill,” but in the interest of optimism and inviting in the new year, I’m just plainly not going to talk about that right now. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there, even if there’s a crocodile infested river under it.

3. Nothing in the first half of the season matters

This is obviously ridiculous, but I felt the need to get this one out of the way in case Boston loses to the New York Knicks tonight to hedge my bets against that. Until Kristaps Porzingis comes back — which is probably around Christmas but who actually knows — nothing matters.

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“We don’t have ______ so you can’t criticize us” is a monumentally lame form of argumentation, but I’m going to use it here as a final line of defense against disaster. Porzingis was the Celtics’ super weapon last year; the final harbinger of the apocalypse for teams unlucky enough to play him. They ripped through the playoffs without him last year, and only got two real NBA Finals games out of him (though the first one was basically a religious experience). If Porzingis is healthy for the whole Playoffs? Forget it.

But it might not be amazing right at the start. Karl-Anthony Towns might cause matchup problems tonight. The Celtics might not have the best rim protection until January. But who cares? The East isn’t like… that good, so Boston should saunter their way to a solid record before getting Porzingis back to own everyone. Sound good? Okay, break.

4. The Los Angeles Lakers suck and aren’t going to be relevant

This isn’t about the Celtics, so I’m not going to sit here and defend this for 400 words, but I think we can all agree that the Lakers are lame and have a super lame roster and are going to have a super lame season with super lame players and achieve super lame moral victories on LeBron James’ super lame two-to-three year farewell tour. That’s all I had to say.

5. The Eastern Conference is worse than it was last year

It’s hard to say that the (inhales) Knicks revolution, a “normal” year for the Bucks and the 76ers slotting Paul George into their cap space along with a year of continuity for young Pacers, Magic and Cavaliers teams makes the conference worse, but it does.

Welcome to the Oliver Fox School of “Do you have a plan to beat the best team in your conference?” where we teach NBA teams that the most important part of… existing is to figure out how to beat the juggernaut in your conference. The Minnesota Timberwolves were built to beat the Denver Nuggets, and they did that. Now the Western Conference has to figure out the Oklahoma City Thunder, but most of the East has made no progress on the Celtics question.

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The Knicks are the only team that has concepts of a plan to match up with the Celtics, and even they are rolling out two defensive liabilities named Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns. They have firepower to match the Celtics’ historically efficient offense, but the rest of the East kind of just pressed “Simulate to Next Season” and hoped their players would progress like it’s a video game.

Maybe they will, but the Pacers, 76ers and Bucks aren’t lighting the world on fire with wing defenders — the Pacers are historically bad at defense, Paul George isn’t the defender he used to be and the Bucks don’t have anybody — and the rest of the conference is such a tire fire of confusion that the Celtics should be a pretty good bet for the number one seed once again.

We’ll see how much they care about that, but with a Joe Mazzulla captained squad rolling through town, I’m sure he’ll get everyone ready to roll. If not, it doesn’t matter. We’re all going to die anyway.