The Boston Celtics are title contenders! The front running Celtics blew a big lead on day one of the season. Typical. The Celtics are a “regular season winning machine.” (A back handed compliment if ever I’ve heard one.) They will regret trading Jaylen Brown. They are better with Paul George. Is this another gap year? Or a half-step-back year? Will there be another big trade? Or is this the core going forward? What’s wrong with Mitchell Robinson? Is Jayson Tatum a realistic MVP contender or just
outside the top candidates? Possession-maxing! Optionality! Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
So many questions, opinions, and hot takes to go around. If you look hard enough, you can find stats, clips, and quotes that will back up just about any opinion you have. The problem is sample size. It is just too early to know what any of this really means.
Long time readers know the drill by now, but I’ll explain for the younger crowd. Every year I encourage readers to hold off on making sweeping judgments about this team until 20 games into the season. That’s roughly a quarter of the year through and enough of a sample size to offset some outlier games.
The team has added some new faces to the team and some (Paul George) are acclimating quicker than others (Mitchell Robinson) but there’s still time for all of that to work itself out. Joe Mazzulla is clearly still tinkering with his lineups. Some of those tinkerings might just continue throughout the year (as was the case for the younger wings all of last year).
My preseason opinion was that this team would win a lot of games this year and that health and luck would play a huge part in how far they go in the playoffs. Nothing I’ve seen thus far would fundamentally make me change that opinion. There are times when they look dominant. There are times when it looks like they forgot which sport they were playing — sometimes in the same game.
Don’t get me wrong, there are certainly things we can see carrying over from prior years that seem pretty consistent. Joe Mazzulla does have them shoot a lot of 3 pointers (note: the strategy is much more nuanced than that, but the end result tends to be a lot of high quality 3 point shots). Jayson Tatum is ridiculously good at basketball. Payton Pritchard feasts on bad defenses (and is getting better against good ones). The young wings are still inconsistent but showing more signs of growth. Derrick White continues to do a lot of little things that help a team win basketball games (regardless of his 3 point percentage).
But there are just so many things that are up in the air at this moment. Is this start from Paul George too good to be true? Will Robinson figure things out and find his footing in this system? Which of the young wings is going to step up into a consistent rotation role (or will it be a revolving door again)? What rotations work well together and which should we shelve forever? This upcoming road trip will provide a lot more context to those questions.
Then again, there are some answers that won’t be conclusive after 20 games either. The regular season is very important, but we’ll remember this year by what happens in the postseason. Health is critical with any team and unfortunately injuries help shape the story of every NBA regular season. Then there’s the trade deadline. What needs will the team have at that point? What long term goals could the team solve with a trade or two? Or what kind of groundwork for deals could they establish for the following offseason?
There’s plenty of time to see how the story of this season plays out. The journey is what makes it fun. So I encourage everyone to resist the hot takes and overreactions of the early season (yes, I know I asked for your hot takes in the mailbag, but that was for kicks and giggles). Let’s give them 20 games to figure things out and get into a groove. Then we can overreact. Just a suggestion.
