The Celtics have to win the NBA Finals

I have now created seven individual Google Docs titled “expectations” and written nothing. This is number eight.

In a brilliant 1976 essay unoriginally—though not unintentionally—titled Why I Write, the late Joan Didion described writing as the process of pulling ideas out of one’s head kicking and screaming, not knowing what they are before they hit the page. As she put it…

“The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture.”

When I was a freshman at Tufts, my spectacular English 101 professor assigned Didion’s highly personal essay, alongside George Orwell’s original Why I Write, to illustrate how the two saw the same theme dramatically differently. Orwell put his motivations for writing into four clean boxes, while Didion described it as the fundamental preservation of one’s own mind.

To Didion, writing is an intellectual paradox in which ideas must be written in order for them to be understood. This had a profound effect on 18-year-old me, who had until then believed his writing was the distillation of complex and well-reasoned ideas. One month after she died, Didion told freshman me that I didn’t need to wait to understand my ideas before writing them down. The writing itself is the understanding.

One might ask, then, if all my writing for CelticsBlog since I joined the team back in August has just been throwing various basketball-related objects at a wall and hoping something sticks. To that I would say, “yes, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.”

But I’m putting some spin on my throws.

This is now attempt #8 at writing whatever has been floating around in my head for two weeks. The best way I can describe it is an angry old man walking around my brain yelling “CELTICS EXPECTATIONS?!” at me and categorically refusing to elaborate. Attempts one through four were fastballs, but two of them hit the backstop and one pegged the umpire directly in the face. Five and six were curveballs that I put in the dirt four feet before the plate and attempt seven was a slider a foot and half wide.

So now I’m down to my last pitch: a knuckle ball, where the laws of writing, basketball and life itself cease to exist, replaced by meta introductions intended to pry a three-ton writer’s block off my chest.

And I’m starting to think this NBA season—and the expectations that come with it—isn’t just a referendum on the Celtics. It’s a referendum on myself.

If we think of the Celtics regular season as a white-wine pasta sauce, we’ve now arrived at the stage where all the components must be reduced over medium-low heat into the thickest and most essential product. With one month until the NBA Playoffs, the Celtics have essentially run dry of regular season storylines. The type of wine doesn’t matter, nor does the proportion of pasta water to butter to Parmesan cheese. All that matters is the sauce.

We had a week of Jayson Tatum MVP campaigning, a few Jaylen Brown explosion stretches, several Derrick White-Jrue Holiday adulation sessions and plenty of Kristaps Porzingis-based discussions over his injuries and world-destroying upside. But in this final month, none of that matters.

Photo by Joe Murphy/NBAE via Getty Images

I believe I am one of the staunchest defenders of the regular season this side of the Mississippi. I demand to care about each and every Celtics game, and will rebuff any attempts to say that nothing matters until April. Basketball is too fun to watch to only concern oneself with the end result.

But even I can feel my brain rejecting these storylines as of late. My brain is the saucepan simmering all the ingredients together, refusing their individuality in favor of the greater good. The Celtics could win 68 games and I’d still steel my gaze and continue marching toward something that scares the hell out of me.

The Celtics have to win the NBA Finals.

The first thing I ever published came out on April 26th of last year, titled “Will this Celtics season be a success?” in which I contrived various levels of succeeding based on how catastrophic individual outcomes would be. It’s a bit of a silly article, but it’s still very important to me given it was my first foray into publishing my thoughts about the Celtics on the internet.

In the last year, that first overture has morphed into a passionate, obsessive psychological war as I try desperately to figure out what I am thinking. And right now, I’m only thinking one thing: the Celtics have to win it all.

Perhaps that’s why this has taken eight entire attempts, since parsing through various levels of expectations in my head was a fool’s errand. There are no expectations, there’s one simple demand. And a clean two outcomes to heartily consider: win it all or… not do that.

Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images

Saying that the Celtics have to succeed is loaded with issues, first among them that it is patently unfair to say to the players—who have poured their entire souls into this season—that it will be all for naught if they don’t close the deal. And last year’s me wouldn’t have said that.

But one of the things that makes being an NBA player so special is the responsibility you have to millions of fans. When you succeed, the relationship between fan and player is inexplicably beautiful. When you fail, that relationship is sad at its best and toxic at its worst. I realize I’m making an incredibly taxing request, but that’s because I believe in my guys.

This Celtics team has to win it all precisely because they are so special. Several teams “have to” win from a resource-investment perspective, such as the Clippers and Suns, but those two teams are still riddled with question marks that will take a Herculean effort to answer all at once.

The Celtics, on the other hand, are out of question marks. They aren’t just a pasta sauce that a semi-adventurous college student makes on a weeknight. They’re the sauce at a Michelin Star restaurant in Copenhagen, made with a $3,000 French bottle of wine, capers sourced from a remote island in Indonesia and Parmesan from the milk of a cow raised from birth to for this dish specifically.

The playoffs are going to be brutal, grueling, overwhelming, maddening, glorious, disastrous, and any other adjectives that you want to add all at the same time. It’s going to be awesome at times and totally suck at others. But this team has a north star through the whole thing: they have to win the Finals.

The only real question is why am I even writing this? It’s March 19th, one month before the playoffs begin, with plenty of time for something to go horribly wrong injury-wise or for the Celtics to lose 15 straight games and end up as the four seed. And it’s not like I’m really breaking new ground, as everyone already knows that the Celtics are out of house money. You could even say I’m jinxing it.

But remember: this isn’t just a referendum on the Celtics, their stars or their roster building theory. It’s a referendum on me, and what kind of fan I’ll be when it’s all over. Why is Oliver Fox—crown prince of overcomplicating things and fine purveyor of telling everyone to calm the hell down—suddenly content to make everything so cut and dry?

Orwell would say it’s out of sheer egoism, and my desire to appear clever and to be remembered. Didion would say it’s because I’ve wrestled with these ideas on a Google Doc for so long that they’ve developed a mind of their own. Maybe none of this philosophical backing means anything at all, and I really am just throwing stuff at a wall.

Or perhaps the Celtics—like myself—are finally guided by something so simple and understandable that all the complexity and nuance boils off like starchy pasta water. Questions, answers, worries, anxieties, and levels of success all yield to one single bullseye.

It’s a two-meter exhaust port that Luke Skywalker has to shoot a proton torpedo through without a targeting computer. But it’s not impossible, since we all used to bullseye Womp Rats in our T-16’s back home. I hear they’re not much bigger than two meters.