As the Celtics sweep through the final stretch of what’s been a magical season of career-best breakouts, I often think about a Media Day headline I wrote when expectations were in a significantly different state.
The 2025-26 Celtics are one big Stay Ready squad.
Ironically, “Stay Ready” isn’t the en vogue phrase of the 2025-26 Boston bench. The ecosystem is significantly different than it was last year, and yet, “Stay Ready” might just hold more meaning than it ever has.
Take last year’s Celtics for
instance. Even as they nursed regular season ailments and kept players away from too heavy a workload through split back-to-backs and extended rest, Boston still had the talent to keep up in the absence of key players. Without Jayson Tatum in the lineup, they were 8-2. Without Jaylen Brown? 15-4.
Clearly the guys that stayed ready were more than up to the task, but that was a mostly run-it-back championship roster. It made a modicum of sense to see the team still find ways to win on a given night against generally lower-quality teams despite missing primary contributors.
What they’re doing this year in the absence of key guys shouldn’t even make sense.
In seven games without Jaylen Brown this season, the Celtics are 6-1 and winners of four straight, having outscored teams by an average of 23.7 points with wins by 45 over Washington, 21 against Houston and, most recently, 27 against Milwaukee. Their lone loss was a two-point defeat in primetime to lowly Indiana, a game which came down to the final shot.
Even without an MVP-caliber talent having the best scoring season of his career, the Celtics somehow don’t miss a step scoring the ball. They’ve shot 45% both from the field and from three in those seven games, while averaging 26 assists, more than their 24.5 per-game average, which ranks 29th in the league.
It’s not just when Brown sits though — it’s every consistent starter.
They’re 2-0 in the absence of Derrick White, holding off a Cleveland comeback behind Payton Pritchard’s 42 points and beating Brooklyn in double-OT with major contributions from rookies Amari Williams and Hugo Gonzalez. In the one game Pritchard missed, Brown scored 41 points in 30 minutes to embarrass Atlanta, 132-106.
Without Neemias Queta, they’re 3-1, including the aforementioned Cavs win, a 117-114 victory over conference-leading Detroit, and their most recent blowout of the Bucks.
Last, and actually least, they’re 1-2 without Sam Hauser, the only one of the team’s five most frequent starters to see a losing record when he’s on the injury report, with the one win being the same Rockets beatdown that Brown was out for and the team’s losses coming to the Spurs and Knicks.
A huge boon for Boston’s success this season has been their roster-wide availability. They’ve managed to avoid the long-term injury bug from their most important players, and when those players do miss time, their next-man up contributors hardly skip a beat.
The Celtics’ play models that of their own coach. They’re defensive lunatics and connected ball-movers on offense who consistently create 2-on-1 advantages in different areas of the floor, allowing all five players a chance to shoot from spots they’re comfortable in.
These Celtics have found a way to meld together into the kind of cohesive force that embraces new influence while still remaining harmonious.
Ron Harper Jr. is a ball-dominant lead guard at the G-League level, capable of creating shots off the dribble and firing isolation threes in the face of a defender. When he replaces Maine with Boston on his jersey, he effectively serves in another role as a spot-up threat that’s hellbent on crashing the glass and scraping on defense.
As described in Noa Dalzell’s piece on Harper’s first career start against Houston on Feb. 4, Harper wasn’t surprised by the news. He was ready, just like his teammates in their own spot start opportunities.
“I knew I was getting a start,” Harper Jr. said, “and I just knew I had to be ready.”
There’s also the development of someone like Baylor Scheierman, whose well-rounded skillset carried over from college to the pros to fill the role of the utility player.
And then there’s someone like Luka Garza, who played his most time on the floor in a month with his 20-minute appearance against the Bucks. Now waiting in the wings as their third big with the addition of Nikola Vucevic, he consistently provides a spark in his opportunities by controlling the offensive glass, making quick handoff decisions at the top of the key, and showing off a previously unseen perimeter game.
In the last three games Brown has missed, each of those three guys have found themselves in the starting five.
Scheierman has found a groove in the starting lineup in recent weeks, starting in the last nine games even as he deals with a fractured shooting thumb. In those nine starts, he’s averaging 9 points on 44% shooting, 6 rebounds and 2 assists while being an average plus-5.3 in 27 minutes per contest.
In starts against Phoenix and Houston, Harper Jr. has been similarly effective, scoring 9.5 points with 7 rebounds while being a combined plus-41 between two blowout wins over Western Conference teams.
Garza, whose start against Houston in the absence of Brown and Hauser was one of three before the trade deadline, had one of his finest games as a Celtic, scoring a season-high 19 points on 7-of-13 shooting.
Gonzalez, who had a career night of 18 points and 16 rebounds against Milwaukee, calls it a team standard.
“We got our standard, and we just want to maintain it every single game,” González said. “We don’t like to (make) excuses. Obviously, we’ve got some really, really important players — starting, important players — that were (out with) illness or resting, and I think we’ve got a really good spirit and took a difficult win after two games in 20 hours.”
The Celtics have unique choices to make when it comes to shaping out a playoff rotation. Who sits on the bench? Who stays on the floor? Is it matchup dependent? Is it a fluid, game-to-game counter-adjustment tool that keeps everyone in line for playoff opportunities?
I don’t envy the team that has to prepare for a Celtics playoff series. You have the constant threat of an All-NBA superstar returning, and even without that reality, you have to find a way to predict the many lineup combinations that could be thrown your way. Mazzulla has never been shy with lineup experimentation. Even if we didn’t necessarily enjoy the recent influx of double-big variations, they were there because he might want that option in his back pocket for later use.
There’s simply no way to know which direction this team takes, but what we do know is that across Boston’s roster, “stay ready” is no longer a mantra — it’s the standard.
