What is the meaning of life?
Is it to constantly pursue new goals, to push ourselves towards our best possible selves? Is it to contemplate the horrors of the indifferent universe in the face of mass human suffering? Is it to gain control over our feeble existence, or simply to delude ourselves into thinking we can ever control anything, let alone ourselves?
However sad, however existentially depressing or brutally nihilistic your answer is, I promise mine is worse. Because right now, the meaning of
my life… is to figure out what the heck is going on with this Celtics season.
I’ve often used philosophy — particularly the existential variety — to explain important concepts in Celtics discourse. Existentialism, and its component branches, are (to me) the extension of human reason to try to explain things that resist understanding. Sports, while played by humans, is a lot like that, given that, despite mountains of “understanding” about it, we are for some reason still unable to predict the results of sporting events. Isn’t that crazy?
So philosophy has been my outlet for Celtics thoughts that never had real-world applications, and the 2021-2025 arc was perfect for that. It was a four-year microcosm of life itself, complete with failures, triumphs, self-doubt, perseverance, intrigue, boredom, and then… conclusion. Glorious conclusion! No more hope, only recollection and blissful finality.
But right now… things have unconcluded themselves. Right now philosophy is FAILING me and I don’t know what to do guys. Please help me I’m scared and the darkness is closing in and I’ve stared so long into the void it’s now staring back at me.
It was over! Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis were gone. Jayson Tatum was out for the year. This was a gap year. I was moving on. I had astral-projected myself from this mortal coil and begun to see things big picture, biding my intellectual time until there was something concrete to dissect, something serious to discuss and get emotionally invested in.
But Jaylen Brown said no, Payton Pritchard and Derrick White said no. Lately, Anfernee Simons has been saying no. Hugo Gonzalez and Luka Garza have repeatedly been saying no. Neemias Queta won’t stop saying no!
They all, in one voice that sounded a lot like Joe Mazzulla, said “no, you are REQUIRED to believe in us. You are required to hope that Jayson Tatum comes back this season because you are required to think we can win a championship THIS year.”
And faced with this ultimatum, I have officially blinked.
The Celtics are the two seed right now, and barring a truly unfathomable collapse, they will make the playoffs outright and avoid the Play-In. In point of fact, they might be in the EXACT SAME SITUATION THEY WERE IN LAST YEAR going into the playoffs: two seed, careening towards the Knicks in the second round. What?
I don’t think society is adequately discussing how ridiculous this is, so let me break down this blueprint for success very slowly for us:
Step 1: Lose your best player to an Achilles tear, get eliminated from the playoffs
Step 2: Use that as the excuse to gut your roster of expensive contracts, salary-dump two All-Stars
Step 3: Do not make any significant additions in Free Agency besides castoff journeymen, rely on unproven wings and bigs for massive rotational minutes
Step 4: Every single player on the team gets simultaneously better all at once, while the Eastern Conference gets simultaneously worse
Step 5: Profit
Existentialism is the extension of human reason onto the unknowable, but that is irrelevant when human reason dictates that the Celtics cannot possibly be succeeding at this level. But they are… and you can check this piece out if you want my efforts to explain why.
Because beyond the why are the implications of this whole shabang. Sports discourse is primarily driven by two things: groupthink and reactive takes. Most people in the regular person world will say what they hear other people around them saying, it’s a safe bet, and that is generally a reaction to explain why of course that happened I mean it’s so obvious for reasons x, y, z, and yada yada yada.
But find me who said x, y, or z OR yada yada yada before said thing happened! You cannot, because the people brave enough to actually try to predict the outcomes of things have to use flimsy things like logic and analytics and evidence-based argumentation rather than simply reacting to narratives and saying things will happen to sustain them.
That’s why this Celtics season is freaking me out. Because unless you said something like, “I think Jaylen will go up a level” (no prior evidence to suggest he would, his efficiency had been decreasing year over year) or “Pritchard can become a three-level scorer playing 30+ minutes” (he’d never been anything close to that) or “I think we’re primed for a Luka Garzassaince” (are you kidding me, bro?), then you should be as shocked as I am. But I don’t feel like people are sufficiently shocked.
It is possible that the meaning of sports — not unlike the meaning of life — is the perceived throughline between a collection of completely random events. Because if you stop and actually dissect the reasons for all the things happening, you’re probably going to find more questions than answers.
In short, this Celtics season has taught me the folly of sports prediction in general. If I call something exactly — like when I said we should trade for Jrue Holiday or when I unironically said the Bucks would trade Khris Middleton and a swap for Kyle Kuzma a month and a half before it happened — am I actually smart? If I’m demonstrably wrong about something — like I was with this entire Celtics season — am I actually dumb? Or is this just one big cumulus cloud of randomness swirling around and I just think it looks like a seahorse?
We can draw a line of best fit only after we have all the data, but we can’t possibly predict the data itself. Reactive takes in sports work because that’s just the best we can do. If every take was proactive, we’d have a bunch of losers like me claiming credit when I was right when I was really just lucky.
I use philosophy to talk about the Celtics, and other stuff, because I have a desire to understand the world. But these Celtics have taught me that sometimes it’s okay not to understand things, but to just embrace what’s going on anyhow. In the weirdest possible way, this is me officially embracing them.
