First round challenges are a Boston Celtics tradition

If you’ve watched the Boston Celtics any time in recent memory, you likely walked away from their Game 2 loss to the Miami Heat with a feeling of deja vu. Indeed, on multiple levels, the surprise loss at TD Garden feels very akin to what we’ve grown familiar with from the Celtics’ recent performance in the postseason. Though they’ve consistently managed to position themselves as a high seed in the Eastern Conference, it’s rare that they’ve been able to breeze through the first round the way you might expect them to.

The fact that this series feels more uncertain than logic suggests it should, then, is honestly something of a tradition. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane and revisit some of the challenges the team has faced in the past couple of decades, and see if there are any lessons we can take from them.

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Our journey starts just last season, in a first round series against the Atlanta Hawks. Facing a Hawks team renowned for its mediocrity — quite literally hanging at or around .500 for the bulk of its season — the Celtics dropped two games on the way to a six-game series win. Pulling the strings was Atlanta star Trae Young, who feels like he was designed in a lab to make his way into an article like this, as a microwave scoring guard and playoff provocateur. In retrospect, this never really felt like a series the Celtics were ever in real danger of losing, but Young and the Hawks have a way of working themselves into your head nonetheless.

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The 2017-18 season brought us another doozy, as the second-seeded Celtics went seven games against the seven-seed Milwaukee Bucks, but this one is a little easier to forgive. The Bucks weren’t quite what they are now; Giannis Antetokounmpo had yet to win his first MVP award and co-star Khris Middleton had yet to make his first All-Star Game, while Boston lacked the services of their would-be top options in Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward. The Celtics that remained were more akin in talent to the Bucks than their records suggested, and the result was a spirited and engaging back-and-forth series that either team had the potential to win. Boston had home-court advantage, however, and that proved to be the deciding factor as neither team claimed a win on the road.

Even their first round sweeps haven’t come easily. Both the 2018-19 win over Indiana and the 2021-22 win over Brooklyn came harder than the final record would suggest. Both series saw single-digit margins of victory in each win, with the Pacers’ defense causing issues for the Irving-led Boston offense (84-74 final score in Game 1) and the Nets’ star power providing a formidable hurdle for Boston to overcome. The Celtics swept Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and the Nets, yes, but they had to work hard for it — including a thrilling Game 1 that ended on a buzzer-beating Tatum layup. The Nets earn an additional mention here for their 2020-21 gentleman’s sweep over Boston, though that series comes with the obvious caveat of Jaylen Brown’s season-ending wrist injury.

Lest we make this sound like an issue exclusive to the Tatum and Brown era of Celtics basketball, though, the history of first round difficulties run deeper in the franchise’s DNA. They’ve been doing this before Tatum even donned a green jersey. Lest we forget the infamous “Rajon Rondo series” against the Chicago Bulls, in which the top-seeded Celtics dropped consecutive games at home against their erstwhile franchise point guard.

The takes we heard after this series! An entire season of brilliant play from Isaiah Thomas and the Celtics distilled down to two games of underperformance. Those Celtics would eventually fall short, of course — they suffered the twin wounds of Thomas’ injured hip and the lack of LeBron James on their roster — but the Bulls hadn’t exposed some fatal flaw in their game. One inspired adjustment from then-coach Brad Stevens to insert sparkplug wing Gerald Green into the starting lineup, and the Celtics won four straight games to advance.

Traveling further back, most of us will remember how grueling the Celtics’ run was through the Eastern Conference en route to the 2008 title. The eventual champions set the NBA record for games played in a single postseason, going to seven games in the first two rounds and six games in the Eastern Conference and NBA Finals.

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From that run, the second round gets most of the attention for Paul Pierce and the Celtics’ battle against then-23-year-old LeBron James and the Cavaliers. But the Atlanta Hawks put the Big Three to the test in the first round too, as a perhaps sneakily talented 8-seed featuring a rookie Al Horford in the first of his many playoffs appearances. The Hawks won every game they played on their home court in that series, including a hard-fought Game 6 win that saw them dispatch the Celtics in crunch time. Boston won Game 7 in dominant fashion, 99-65, but the Hawks made a statement in that series, planting the seeds of what would coalesce into a 60-win top seed team a few years down the road.

What does all of this mean for the 2023-24 Boston Celtics? In terms of the tangible, not much. They were the best team in the NBA this season, and they’re facing an eight-seed absent its best player. Winning the next three games and moving on to battle the winner of Cavs-Magic is the expectation — anything else would serve as a disappointment. History can be instructive, but as a predictive tool, it’s unreliable. This is not the same Celtics team as any of the others mentioned here; their fate will be of their own making.

Intangibly, though, this feels like an opportunity to exorcise some demons. All of these first round series, in one way or another, have fed into a prevailing train of thought that this franchise underwhelms relative to its potential in the postseason — to say nothing of their struggles with the Heat in the later rounds of recent playoff runs. This is the year for the Boston Celtics to flip the script — to show that they’re truly built different. Take care of the Miami Heat in the rest of this series, and Game 2’s loss morphs from a continuation of a concerning trend to a footnote in the history of this franchise.