So not much happened in official Celtics news last week. Brad Stevens gave a press conference which, while not quite promising the Wyc Grousbeckian “fireworks” of 2014 that never quite materialized, suggested that the team would be looking to address shortcomings that revealed themselves in the playoff series against Philadelphia.
On the CelticsBlog Slack, there were a host of Jaylen Brown trade scenarios pitched, along with trade scenarios for Derrick White and Sam Hauser. Jayson Tatum even made
a surprise appearance.
And I had to ask myself, “Is this what other fanbases do?”
Because I didn’t particularly enjoy it.
Barring injury, the Celtics have been consistent Eastern Conference contenders for almost ten straight years now. They’ve been to the Finals twice, have won once, and have been the most consistently good team in the NBA since Danny Ainge made the widely panned moves to draft Brown and Tatum in back-to-back years.
In short, we have been spoiled. We have been very, very spoiled.
A long summer stretches out before us, with very little to engage our attention as fans. Shoot. We couldn’t even get excited about the lottery, and with the fourth best record in the league, draft chatter is going to be hard to get into, at least for me, because the farther down the draft you go, the harder it is to rank players.
There may be a consensus #1, but there is never a consensus 27th pick, and basically the predictions at this section of the draft are white noise. This is the part of the draft where I tend to think that ‘character counts,’ and that comes down to interviews and one-on-one sessions that draft predicters aren’t part of.
For example, the Celtics apparently saw something in Baylor Scheierman that suggested he would be a far better defender than writers who focused primarily on clips of his role and style of play at Creighton for their evaluations. That ‘something’ didn’t show up on film from a program where Scheierman was asked to do very little on the defensive end of the court.
So I can’t really get into draft predictions.
The rest of the playoffs are a rather flavorless affair for me as well. Perhaps that’s a knock against me as a basketball fan. To be sure, if my Dad were still around, he’d still be watching, and my younger brothers are both still watching, but even the most amazing plays sort of stop at the back of my eyeballs when I’m watching other teams. I can appreciate good offense and good defense up to a point, but it just doesn’t move me the way watching the Celtics does.
Plus, I really don’t like the Thunder. They’ve taken the place of the Warriors as a team to dislike because of their combination of dirty play and favorable whistles. The difference is that they’ve basically ratcheted the whole thing up to eleven. Lu Dort is…well, let’s just say that he makes Draymond Green look like St. Francis of Assisi, and SGA’s whistle is not to be believed at this point in time.
As Celtics fans, we’re on the outside looking in at both sources of entertainment at this point in the season.
It’s an odd place to be.
As I said earlier, we’ve been spoiled.
Boston’s management has been rock solid—they’ve made moves when moves are necessary, they’ve drafted exceptionally well, and they’ve given us plenty to get excited about.
I’m confident that they know what they’re doing, that they—along with Mazzulla—have a pretty good idea what went wrong against Philadelphia, and they’ll find the right combination of patience and action to move the team forward for next season.
But in the meantime, we as fans have to choose between building castles in the air and twiddling our thumbs. We can either cook up crazy trade scenarios that never really pan out, or we can dive deep into the middle of this year’s draft class to see if we can suss out which player the Celtics are likely to land on with their pick, or we can basically mark time until the draft, free agency, and the summer league give us something concrete to talk about.
The C’s might make a couple trades around the draft, but the reality is that the league year ends on June 30, and the team is so dang close to the tax line that any moves they make will have to be very tightly constrained in terms of salary, and in any case, the draft is still six weeks away.
One of the weirder aspects of the abrupt end to this season is that when it comes to improving the team, we’re now talking about trading guys that we spent the past eight months cheering on.
It was a bit understandable last season when the salary cap situation meant that the C’s were going to have to part ways with a lot of money.
It’s another thing when you’re looking at a guy who deserved legit MVP consideration for what he did for the team and saying, “Yeah, but can we get Giannis if we trade him?”
This is where I have to wonder what it’s like for fans of other NBA teams that get caught in this limbo.
Do they really spend months speculating on roster moves that don’t happen and draft picks that don’t get made?
It all seems rather strange to me. Like, how do you go from rooting for Jaylen Brown to shopping him for Giannis and then, when that doesn’t pan out, back to rooting for him next season?
Perhaps I’m too wedded to the concrete, and I need to spend more time using my imagination—perhaps that’s the key to being a fan of a team that isn’t regularly a contender. Perhaps you have to have the ability to imagine your team being a contender because, in reality, they don’t have much of a shot.
That might be my problem.
I haven’t had to imagine the Celtics being contenders. They’ve just been contenders, period.
