You don’t have to be bad to be a heel

I don’t know much about professional wrestling, but I do know that it couldn’t exist without ‘heels’ — guys that exist to be booed, to make the scripted triumphs of their foes all the sweeter.

They are, in basketball terms, the Washington Generals—if the Washington Generals were staffed by nothing but Bill Laimbeers.

And so, we find the Celtics with a decent chance of making the NBA Finals and playing the heel. They won 64 games this season, and they won their conference by fourteen. Yet, it’s difficult to imagine a team that has been the subject of a greater degree of scoffing and dismissal as the postseason began.

The Celtics, we are told, have such an easy path to the Finals that getting there will be somewhat akin to stealing a walker from an elderly gent sitting on a park bench.

When the Celtics win big, the knock on them is that they struggle in close games. When the Celtics win close games, the knock is that they should’ve won big.

When the Cs finally logged ‘clutch time’ minutes in Monday’s Game 4 in Cleveland, their first in over a month, and ended up winning without a lot of effort, the media—and social media—arbiters (self-appointed, of course) insisted that they should’ve won by more. When they won by fifteen on Wednesday, it wasn’t a good win because the Cavs stuck around too long.

The Celtics, who have the best record in the postseason by a long shot, have “the worst offense I’ve seen for grown folks,” according to Charles Barkley. Over at Yard Barker, Mike Santa Barbara worries about their defense. He says that “their inability to make consistent stops against a short-handed Cavaliers team might be a reason for pause.”

After Monday’s win, The Sporting News contributor Josh Eberly (in a subsequently deleted tweet) reminded us all that he thinks the Celtics are the “least serious, serious contender” he’s ever seen. On Bleacher Report, the play of everyone not named Jayson Tatum was dubbed “lackadaisical” by Scott Polacek, and even he wasn’t exempt from an accusation of “sleepwalking.”

What’s behind all this carping? Why are the Cs getting trashed when they lose and when they win?

Maybe some of it’s gambling-related. The Cs narrowly missed the over on Monday and again on Wednesday.

But I think there’s more to it than that.

Think back to when Tatum and Jaylen Brown were drafted. When the C’s picked Brown, there were boos at the Garden watch party, as fans who were hoping the team would trade for Jimmy Butler were disappointed. Outside the Garden, that pick was routinely panned. Bleacher Report said that Ainge had to “settle” on Brown and then made the bold claim that Demetrius Jackson was the team’s best pick of the night. Over at CBS Sports, the pick was given a B- grade, with the comment that the C’s maybe should have “capitalized differently” on the pick. When The Sporting News was doing an April survey of college players ahead of the draft, Brown wasn’t even the first player named on a very underwhelming Cal team. At least one rival GM thought Brown was ‘too smart’ to play in the NBA. Paul Flannery, writing for SB Nation, the mothership for CelticsBlog, called Brown the “third pick in a two player draft.”

Neil Greenberg, in an article for the Washington Post headlined “Celtics selected one potential bust after another at the 2016 draft,” raked Brown over the coals for his college field goal percentage, and included an ESPN Stats & Info projection that gave Brown a 38% chance of being a bust, as opposed to an 8% chance of being an All-Star. Before the draft, Josh Planos also at the Washington Post, cited the Boston’s “atrocious” record in the draft and finished his article by exhorting the Celtics to “deal this pick.”

Photo by Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images

Jump ahead a year, and the C’s, for the first time ever, secured the top pick in the lottery. They proceed to trade down, swapping their pick with Philly’s third pick, and obtaining the Sixers’ 2019 first rounder as well.

And what did we all think of this?

Bleacher Report described the Tatum pick as “…interesting,” in contrast to Markelle Fultz, a “legitimate stud” and “the complete package.” Lonzo Ball, the Lakers’ number two pick, who last played for Chicago two years ago, got an A grade. Over at USA Today, the final word on Tatum was that his polished game might indicate “a lack of upside.”

The Celtics’ decision to trade down to the number three spot, after dangling just enough interest in Markelle Fultz to make Philly worried, paid off eventually when Romeo Langford, taken with the pick Philly traded to Boston in that deal, headlined a swap with San Antonio that brought Derrick White to Boston.

When the Celtics suspended Ime Udoka and made Joe Mazzulla their interim coach, that raised more than a few eyebrows. And when that season ended with a flameout in the Eastern Conference Finals, well, there were plenty of knives at the ready.

“If major personnel changes aren’t possible, the only route to meaningful progress could be a new voice on the sideline,” was the considered opinion of Christopher Kline with FanSided. Fox Sports’ Colin Cowherd used fewer words: “you gotta get rid of the coach.” From USA Today affiliated For the Win, Charles Curtis said, “Joe Mazzulla is clearly not the answer.” Ryan Bologna at Clutch Points, wrote a post headlined “Why the Celtics must fire Joe Mazzulla after Game 7 debacle vs. Heat.”

The way the C’s assembled their current roster and coaching staff, methodically, if not in a linear fashion, has been subject to ongoing criticism. Cowherd has been on Jayson Tatum’s case for quite a while now, saying that he’s “not as good as the ‘young guard,’” as though, at 26, he’s past his prime. He’s also claimed that “nobody fears the Celtics.”

To bottom line it, a lot of folks have invested a lot of ink discounting the Celtics. It’s not just a question of these people picking that hill to die on — they actually built the hill first.

Still, there’s more to it than that.

Denver assembled themselves a pretty nifty team, and they did it by drafting guys with huge question marks that turned into stars, and it took a while for them to find the right coach, but look at them… Even during their run to the title last year, they were more media darlings than anything else.

With Minnesota, well, shoot, we’re mostly happy to see a team that has wallowed, not just in mediocrity, but in outright incompetence for almost its entire existence, looking like a contender.

But the Celtics? A team which was carefully assembled, over the course of years, into this season’s only 60-plus-game winner? They’re “unserious,” and should be ashamed of the games they win and embarrassed by the games they lose.

Why were the plucky, but understaffed Heat given the star treatment after they won the second game of their series with Boston?

It’s not just because folks have spent years attempting to discredit Boston. It’s because nobody likes it when the Celtics are good.

Photo by Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images

The NBA has been around for 78 years. Boston has made it to the Eastern Conference or Eastern Division Finals 38 times. Since Bill Russell was drafted, it’s 35 times in 68 years.

The Celtics are inevitable. They’ve won more games than any other team in NBA history. They have been so consistently good for so long that almost every great in the history of the league has either played for the Celtics or has had to beat the Celtics. If you are a fan of any other team in the East, the Celtics are your eternal bête noire.

And let’s face it, those Eastern Conference teams have history with the C’s that goes back decades. What do you have in the Western Conference? Only three teams there date back to the NBA’s founding, and one of those teams is the Kings. There’s no there there. It doesn’t matter how bad the Knicks are, there’s always going to be something extra for Celtics fans when they beat the Knicks at Madison Square Garden. Is anybody in Los Angeles getting revved up when the Lakers beat the Spurs at the <insert name here> Center in San Antonio?

Because here’s the crazy thing.

The C’s have won more games than anyone, but they haven’t been to as many conference/division finals as the Lakers. In their overall history, LA has been to those rounds 42 times. That’s more than half of them. They’ve also got three more playoff appearances than the C’s.

So what gives? Why aren’t the Lakers as unpalatable to basketball fans? Why did David Stern say in 2004 that his ideal playoff matchup was “The Lakers versus the Lakers”?

Why is it that the Lakers are so popular when they’re good, but when the Celtics are good, it just sorta ticks people off?

Photo by Brian Babineau/NBAE via Getty Images

Well, first off, and I hate to break it to some of you, but it’s something I can say with a pretty reasonable certainty from my vantage point here in the middle of America: nobody likes Boston.

There, I said it. It’s out in the open, and we can talk about it.

Now, for Bostonians, the response might well be, “nobody likes us because they’re jealous,” and I’ll concede that there’s certainly a smidgen of jealousy over Boston’s history, its universities, and at times, its sports teams.

But there’s more to it than that. It’s the Puritans, and the unjustified sense of superiority that seems to be the only part of their heritage that has survived. It’s the snobbishness and elitism associated with Harvard, Boston’s most famous institution.

It’s the notion that, if being a Bostonian doesn’t entitle you to cut to the front of the line at a Dunkin’ Donuts out in the provinces, it at least makes you just a little bit better than the rest of us. It’s the idea that living in proximity to MIT adds a little extra je ne sais quoi to your being that outlanders can’t acquire at any price.

Boston is the only city in America that has a special term for its upper crust. There are Boston Brahmins, but what’s the equivalent in New York? Or even Beverly Hills?

And, while we’re being completely honest with one another, when it comes to sports, it’s also the fans.

We all get to feeling pretty good when our teams win. But geez, guys, none of the Celtics’ greatness rubs off on us. We’re the same guys this morning, rooting for a team that’s going to its sixth ECF in eight years, than we were Tuesday morning rooting for a team that got blown out at home in Game 2.

But Boston fans, of late, have taken this idea that fans absorb the reflected glow of their team’s success to a whole other level.

Back when the Patriots and Red Sox were winning a lot, this “City of Champions” thing started, and I have to tell ya, it’s pretty ridiculous to claim that the Patriots and Red Sox turning into powerhouses after being afterthoughts for decades changed Boston into a “City of Champions.” When Ray Bourque brought the Cup to Boston in 1999, 15,000 people showed up at City Hall just to take a look at it.

The teams may have changed in the interim, but the people? Not so much.

It’s fun to root for a winner, but you’re the same guy you’d be if you were rooting for a loser.

Yet we still haven’t gotten to the bottom of it. Why do good Celtics teams irk NBA fans?

It’s not just because it’s Boston. People on the other side of the Appalachians don’t much care for any of the overcrowded cities of the Atlantic coast. We like our spaces wide open and our cities few and far between. We don’t like New York because people there think their town is the center of the universe, and we don’t like Philadelphia because, I mean, they threw snowballs at Santa Claus and booed the Easter Bunny, and also that cheesesteak thing? It’s good, but it’s not that great. Washington, D.C.? The less said the better. About the only major city on the Atlantic coast that middle America has no particularly negative opinion of is Baltimore, and that’s because we’re always forgetting that it even exists.

California is different, though. Even though we don’t particularly like California, we can’t get enough of it. I’ll watch old episodes of the Rockford Files and dream about driving through the mountains and the deserts around L.A. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read and re-read Raymond Chandler’s novels, soaking up his 1930s L.A. settings.

Even if we hate the spectacle that is Hollywood, it draws us in. I won’t read an article that has a picture of some couple on a red carpet, but I’m going to stop long enough to see who they are.

LA is a bright light, and we’re still moths.

Then, back in the early 80s, the Lakers managed to tie their identity to that light. They played in the “Fabulous Forum,” a Modernist monument in a city where the sun shines most of the time and it never rains, not the if-you-stop-and-think-about-it oddly named Boston “Garden,” a daunting but dilapidated hulk built atop a brake-dust coated commuter train station in a city of overcast winters and hothouse summers.

And those Lakers teams were good. They were very very good.

Their architect?

Bill Sharman.

A guy whose number is hanging in the Garden rafters.

And that is the final—and perhaps the most impressive—reason why nobody likes the Celtics.

Not Bill Sharman, per se, but what he represents.

It’s not just that basketball was invented in Massachusetts, it’s not just that the Boston Celtics are a perennial obstacle to every other team in the East.

It’s the shadow that the Celtics cast across the entire league, reaching its farthest outposts in Los Angeles.

Bill Russell’s number isn’t just hanging in the rafters in Boston. It’s hanging in the rafters in Miami. It’s in the rafters in Charlotte. It’s hanging in San Francisco. Nobody in the league will ever wear that number again.

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Then there’s Red.

Augustus Caesar supposedly said, “I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.”

Red could make a similar claim about his unmatched career. In the 1950s, the game, barely a generation removed from jump balls after every made basket and confronting the novelty of a shot clock, consisted pretty much of throwing the ball to the tallest guy on your team who was in the general vicinity of the hoop, and letting him shoot. He had a pretty good chance of making the shot because his defender had been told that it’s a bad idea to jump.

Defense, in this era, was equally rudimentary: Try to stop the other team from passing the ball to their tallest guy, so some other guy has to shoot.

The Celtics’ tallest guy at the time was Easy Ed Macauley. A really good tall guy on offense who just wasn’t good enough to be the best tall guy on offense when the stakes got high.

It was Auerbach who realized that every team spends about half the game playing defense. And that if he had a really good defender playing center, he could disrupt the game plan of every team in the league. Of course he didn’t just find a “really good defender,” he found the best defensive center the game will ever know.

It was also Auerbach who realized that if you move fast enough after you make the other team miss, the defense will be chasing your guys down the court, and that makes a lot of fun and interesting stuff possible.

Red’s teams changed the way the game is played. And Red’s players went everywhere. Even today, eighteen years after Auerbach’s death, one of his draft picks, Danny Ainge, is President of the Jazz and another, Rick Carlisle, is coaching the Pacers.

Nine coaches in the NBA have direct connections to the Boston Celtics. Eleven of the league’s assistant coaches have Boston ties, and four of them got their first NBA gigs in Boston.

It’s not just that the Celtics are an almost inevitable obstacle in the playoffs, it’s not just that the Celtics’ have so many rivalries, and those rivalries have been handed down from one generation to the next like family heirlooms, it’s not just that people don’t like the city of Boston.

It goes deeper than that. The Celtics are the NBA in a manner that differs from the influence the Yankees have had on the Major Leagues, or that of the Canadiens on the NHL. The Celtic influence is everywhere in professional basketball.

If you’re a fan of any other team, looking up at the Celtics is bad enough, but realizing that the only way to reach their level is by hiring their people, playing their way, and building your team the way they built theirs?

Ever since Shaq left for the Lakers and Kobe let it be known he didn’t want to be drafted by anyone else, you could always dismiss the Lakers’ success as sort of sui generis. It was something to be envied, but not emulated. Nobody was going to out-Laker the Lakers (although the Knicks sure tried for a while).

That’s not the case with the Celtics. The Celtics have just gone out and done things that pretty much any team could do—but they’ve done them better.

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How would you like to be a Sixers fan and know that your team, legitimately, could have had Jrue Holiday, Derrick White, Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum and Al Horford on it? But instead, your team picked Fultz and Simmons, and traded away Horford, Holiday and the pick that became Derrick White.

Boston’s advantage was never location. Boston was never glitzy. It was never glamorous. No, the only advantage the Celtics have is brains.

And boy, is that annoying. And it’s especially annoying when you think they’re wrong and they turn out to be right.