What do these Boston Celtics, this specific group of players, want to be remembered as?
The “Most Successful Celtics Team Since 2007-2011?” The “Team that Won the 2024 Championship Amidst Four Golden State Warriors Rings and Five Oklahoma City Thunder Rings?” The “Short-lived Superteam with an Impressive Wikipedia Page?”
I doubt that’s what they want. But losses like Friday night’s against the Sacramento Kings — without De’Aaron Fox, at home, with a fully healthy team, after two days off — certainly make me question what they want. Since December 21, the Celtics are a pedestrian 6-6, inspiring fear in absolutely nobody and showing zero competitive instinct beyond what their innate talent forces out of them.
Shoddy outside shooting certainly contributed to the loss, but don’t let that trick you into thinking Boston is just getting unlucky. I was in the building for the first time all season, and they were just standing around, either watching Malik Monk take embarrassingly wide-open threes or Domantas Sabonis grab one of his 28 rebounds. To be tied heading into the fourth quarter and lose by seventeen isn’t about shooting; it’s about trying hard enough.
Perhaps this team is trying to figure out what the stakes are of this season, unable to place it between “holy crap, we’re all going to get buried alive underneath the weight of historical failure if we don’t win,” which defined the last three seasons, and simply reaping the rewards of their one-time success — new contracts, endorsements and maybe even new teams, which is now threatening to define the next three.
So, allow me to help clear things up: this team is going to be torn apart by the NBA’s extraordinarily-restrictive collective bargaining agreement in roughly two years, at which time the Celtics will likely be unable to re-sign Kristaps Porzingis and maybe even be forced to trade another starter. None of it is clear enough to prognosticate, but I don’t know who’s going to be on this team in two years. Neither do you, and honestly, neither do the Celtics.
That makes the stakes of this season and the next abundantly clear: if these Boston Celtics want to be anything more than a green flash on the “List of NBA Champions” Wikipedia page, they’re going to have to lock in and smell the existentially-threatening roses. Was this all just a fling? Was the seven-year journey from Kyrie Irving, Gordon Hayward, Kemba Walker to the Jays taking over, to completing the Infinity Gauntlet with Derrick White, Kristaps Porzingis and finally Jrue Holiday just about one awesome season? Is that actually it?
If it is, it’s certainly not the worst-case scenario. One championship is awesome. It’s more than most teams get. And we will all get to remember this Celtics team fondly either way. But there has to be more, right? This team — this historically-great team — surely wants more, right?
Sooner or later, the Celtics are going to have to decide. The level of competition this year is stifling. It makes last year look like a leisure stroll through Candyland. It may seem impossible, rude and downright mean to ask a team that gave everything they had to win it all last year to level up even further, but that’s the deal. That’s what it’s going to take if they want to be more than they currently are. It’s a horrible, unfair, absolutely ruthless world, but it’s the one that NBA history begrudgingly lives in. Last night, and these last three weeks, make me wonder if the Celtics still want to be there.
