Overthinking the Celtics
On the weight of seeming invincibility.
Good morning. Let’s basketball.
Self-Portrait (Man With a Pipe); Gustave Courbet; 1848-49
When a basketball team goes 80-21 over the course of nine months through the regular season and playoffs — 64-18 through 82, 16-3 in the postseason, never losing more than one game in a series — and brings back almost literally the entire roster, they should probably be serious favorites in the next season, especially when the stars of the team are relatively young.
So it goes with the Boston Celtics, led by 26-year-old All-NBA forward Jayson Tatum, 27-year-old Finals MVP Jaylen Brown, 29-year-old unicorn Kristaps Porzingis, 30-year-old gluestick Derrick White and veterans Jrue Holiday (34, genius defender) and Al Horford (38, genius defender). Payton Pritchard, Sam Hauser, Luke Kornet and Xavier Tillman are back, too. All fifteen Celtics registered Finals minutes last season. Thirteen of them are back in green. The two missing weren’t exactly critical cogs: Oshae Brissett (currently a free agent) and Svi Mykhailiuk (in Utah). They played just over 1,000 minutes combined last season.
I’m typically of two minds about overwhelming favorites.
The first is the part of me that claims a fistful of teams as “legit contenders” any given fall and spring. I truly believe that if a team wins lot of regular season games, it could win four playoff series with the right breaks. And the right breaks matter a lot and are hard to predict. So building a contender list that is not terribly exclusive makes sense. You need to be ready not just for the 2024 Celtics (an obvious contender) or the 2023 Nuggets or the mid-2010s Warriors or 2000s Spurs. You need to be ready for the 2019 Raptors (lots of wins, a few good breaks) and the 2021 Bucks and the 2022 Warriors. Part of the project of being inclusive and expansive in building a contender list is necessarily rejecting the idea of NBA hegemons, or at a minimum seeing their flaws as potentially Achillean.
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The second frame of mind that is relevant here is that truly I believe that teams that win most of their games are usually the best teams, regardless of talk of alphas and 16-game players vs. 82-game players and pressure and all of that. There is merit in the fact that the playoffs are more difficult than the regular season. This is largely, in my opinion, due to the stiffer competition. But if you can win lots of regular season games, you can win a playoff series. The odds are just higher — especially in the West or beyond the first round in the East — that you’re facing a fellow team that can win lots of regular season games and thus series.
By this second view, the Celtics are the single most well-equipped team to stomp everyone (again) in 2024-25. By the measure of winning games, it’s pretty difficult to win more than Boston did last season. And they brought everyone back. Any argument against the Celtics about the Celtics (save the one in the next paragraph) is going to run into that reality: this is a team that has proven to be awesome.
The one wrinkle: it appears Kristaps Porzingis will miss some time to start the season, and that is generally Boston’s most shallow depth zone. Kornet and Tillman are going to get lots of playing time behind Horford through the end of the fall. The wrinkle on that wrinkle: Boston did fine without Porzingis last season. In the regular season, the Celtics went 43-14 (.754) with Porzingis and 21-4 (.840) without him. While he was absolutely enormous in Game 1 of the Finals, he missed a huge chunk of the playoffs. Boston went 10-2 without him, including beating Cleveland 4-1 and Indiana 4-0.
Again, it’s hard to drum up any other argument against Boston about Boston. Sure, it’s hard to repeat and no NBA team has done it since the 2018 Warriors. But that’s a generality, a trend. Trends don’t beat juggernauts. Sure, long Finals runs wear a team down. But no one on the roster played an overwhelming amount in the Olympics. (Sentence edited because it was inaccurate. - TZ)
There are new rivals rising in the East, and that really does matter: the Celtics never had to face the Knicks, who have remade the cast around Jalen Brunson, and the Sixers look legitimately imposing. Giannis Antetokounmpo remains the best player in the conference, and if he’s healthy going into a playoff series against anyone, that anyone should be afraid. To note that the Knicks, Sixers and Bucks are legitimate contenders in the East is not a minimization of what Boston has done. It is an acknowledgement that competition matters, and facing a full-powered 2024-25 Knicks squad instead of a worn-out Pacers team, or a three-headed Embiid-Maxey-PG monster instead of the injury-riddled Cavaliers, or Giannis instead of Tyler Herro — any of those could lead to different results, or a more difficult challenge. They could require a healthy Porzingis this time, and continued health and availability for the ever-present stars like Tatum, Brown, White and Holiday.
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Competition matters. That’s what really felled the Nuggets last season: they ran into a great rising team tailormade to beat them, which the Timberwolves did. In seven. The Nuggets looked like a juggernaut in 2023, brought most of the key rotation players (including the Best Player Alive) back … and lost in the second round, because they ran into a team arguably better than anyone they faced the postseason prior. Competition matters.
Last year was last year, and it was the most impressive wire-to-wire performances for a team since the 2017 Warriors (that first season of Durant and Curry). You know what happened to that Warriors team, whose core was a couple years older than Boston’s current core but had higher higher-end talent? They took their foot off the gas the next regular season and stars missed some time, and they almost lost in the conference finals (competition matters) … before winning the title. I think most Boston fans would take that outcome. But it’s not without peril. (In the following season, injuries beset the team in the playoffs and they lost in the Finals. Then they broke up.)
The Celtics are the favorites to win the East and, in my opinion, the championship. This is chalk, this is safe, this is obvious. But nothing is guaranteed, and since nothing is guaranteed, it’s worth spending lots of time watching and analyzing and worrying over the Sixers, Knicks, Bucks, maybe the Cavs, maybe the Magic, maybe the Pacers, maybe even the Heat and all of those West teams because nothing is guaranteed, not even continued Celtics’ hegemony. Every season is new, and while the Celtics are starting from an excellent spot and would be the least surprising champion, you still have to play out the season, and a lot can change fast in the NBA. So here’s to seeing how this unfolds.
If A Player Hits A Game-Winning Buzzer Beater In Preseason, Does It Make A Sound?
Nice work, Lindy Waters III.
Meet the Jameses
The LeBrons James shared the court in the Lakers’ second preseason match on Sunday. It was as uneventful as that sentence sounds.
Bronny has … not been terribly effective so far in the preseason, as is befitting his status as a freshly minted 20-year-old second-round pick who missed a huge chunk of his sole college season.
Let’s turn now to the locker room interviews.
Thanks, Mr. James Jr. And now, let’s go to national LeBron James correspondent LeBron James.
Jovan Buha’s story on the scene in The Athletic is really cool. It’s easy to be cynical about this, but I find it legitimately affecting. Present, engaged fatherhood comes in different forms, and LeBron is providing an awesome example.
Karl-Anthony Towns Is A Knick
Imagine getting back from a late offseason meditation retreat where you’ve been unplugged for a few weeks and turning on the T.V. and seeing Karl-Anthony Towns doing this in that uniform in a preseason game.
Gradey Duck
Here is Gradey Dick doing a truly incredible Donald Duck impression (3:05 mark of the video if it doesn’t automatically start there).
Schedule
More preseason on deck. All times Eastern.
MONDAY
Magic at Pelicans, 1:30
New Zealand Breakers at Sixers, 7
Grizzlies at Mavericks, 8
Thunder at Spurs, 8, NBA TV
Rockets at Jazz, 9
TUESDAY
Heat at Hornets, 7
Bulls at Cavaliers, 7
Suns at Pistons, 7
Pacers at Hawks, 7:30, NBA TV
Nets at Clippers, 10:30
Alright, back on Wednesday (paid subscribers only). Be excellent to each other.
I had to honestly LOL at TheBrons comments juxtaposed. Thank you, metacorrespondent Tom Ziller.
Gradey Duck got a good belly laugh outta me.