The fate and fortune of the Boston Celtics

This season didn’t start on October 26.

It didn’t start on October 1 with the acquisition of Jrue Holiday nor when the Celtics traded Marcus Smart for Kristaps Porzingis on June 23. It wasn’t the moment Jaylen Brown inked his extension, and it wasn’t when the final buzzer sounded in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals.

No, the 2023-2024 Celtics’ season—along with their dreams of revenge, immortality, and Banner 18—started on May 21, 2017.

The 2017 playoffs are the watershed moment for the modern Celtics juggernaut. Captained by the heroic 5’9” Isaiah Thomas nursing a hip injury, the 2016-2017 Celtics clawed their way through the Bulls in round one and ended the only good Wizards season in 50 years with a Kelly Olynyk Game 7 eruption in round two.

But then fate took away Thomas, ending his playoff run—and ultimately his Celtics tenure—with a hip injury. The Celtics then waltzed into the Eastern Conference Finals facing a Cleveland Cavaliers team stacked to the nines with All-Stars, future and former champions and probably three Hall of Famers. But somehow, they stood as one of the four best teams in the league for the first time since 2012.

Twenty-nine fan bases will remember that series as an unceremonious gentleman’s sweep, and for four games it was that. But Celtics fans will remember that series for Game 3, Boston’s lone victory and for the legitimate Black Swan event needed to achieve it. No one but me calls it this, but that was “The Avery Bradley Shot Game.”

In the first frame lies the first set of time-travel oddities. Marcus Smart sizes up LeBron James, wholly convinced that he has this completely under control. This mindset, usually in the face of often overwhelming odds, would come to define the next six years of Smart’s career, for better and for worse. Eventually, it would be no small part of why he was traded before he could get to the promised land.

And who’s that in the corner? Is that… Kristaps Porzi—no, it’s Jonas Jerebko! The Swedish wonder played an oddly similar role—and has an oddly similar haircut—to Porzingis, who currently dons the #8 jersey. Granted, Jerebko only played like Porzingis in the same way a Toyota Corolla and a Maserati are both cars, but it remains eerie to look at.

There’s Al Horford, a consistent character throughout recent Celtics history, and over there on the bench… is that Jaylen Brown? The wide-eyed rookie with a high top only logged 12 minutes and missed all three of his attempted shots. But there he was, and no Celtics fan, no matter how plugged in, could have predicted in that moment what he would become.

Next to Horford is the man of the hour: Avery Bradley, the second to last man in Boston Celtics history to wear the #0. His jersey still occupies a high seat of honor in my closet, and after Bradley’s departure, I would still wear it to games for six more years. I’m sure most who only saw the front merely assumed it was Jayson Tatum and moved on, but the real ones knew Adidas from Nike.

Photo by Mitchell Leff/Getty Images

Bradley’s shot is beautiful, not for its purity but for its temporal perfection. Had Bradley laced a perfect swish, the Cavaliers would have been afforded plenty of time to retaliate with a game winner of their own. But Bradley fluffed the shot just enough to get one of the great shooter’s rolls in NBA history, painstakingly bleeding every possible second off the clock until the Cavaliers had nothing but a sarcastic 0.1 to work with.

That first-frame image showed the future of the Celtics, and the shot showed that fate was at least intrigued by what this team would be going forward. Today’s Celtics are the direct descendants of that moment, and the ensuing cascade of moves, changes, and evolutions would come to define the dream that all fans share today.

Today, that dream is as distilled as it will ever be. The Celtics will either fulfill it or they will not, and the stakes are higher than ever. It’s either the opportunity of a lifetime—the best chance they’ll ever have of etching their names in history—or a crushing burden of expectation and demand, heavy enough to sink even the sturdiest of ships.

Or maybe it’s both at the same time, left entirely up to the team to decide which will define their latest shot for the moon. In either case, we’re clean out of time for safety checks. It’s all systems go for liftoff.

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Depending on who you ask, this season is either a righting of the ship or a revenge tour.

One could easily argue that a 64-win Celtics team has helped restore balance to the universe. The NBA season had plenty of fireworks, complete with bizarre coaching changes, shocking injuries, and playoff quagmires. But the Celtics led the Eastern Conference wire-to-wire while enduring about as much drama as a guy in an East German mailroom sealing letters for the Stasi. Yeah, there’s protests and walls falling around him, but he’s got his Walkman and his steely determination to do his job until there’s no more job left to do. Nothing to see here.

And even after winning so many games, there really is still nothing to see here. The whole NBA world—Celtics fans most of all—understands that no regular season achievement is cause for celebration nor even all that impressive. Boston is loaded, boasting the best starting five since the 2018 Golden State Warriors and depth pieces that continue to outperform expectations. Anything less than a convincing one seed finish would have raised an eyebrow or two.

That doesn’t mean fans don’t deserve a moment to revel in the team’s success. But they must do so with a modicum of care, understanding that the Celtics are, at any point from here on in, at most only 192 minutes away from going home, no matter how well things may have gone in the regular season.

Three hours and twelve minutes. The ship may be sailing straight as an arrow for the time being, but it only has to steer off course for one showing of The Godfather: Part II for it all to be over.

The sailors among us will surely want to keep the ship as steady as possible through the ensuing storms. That would mean finding calmer waters, and rooting for the scariest opponents to lose before they can even reach Boston. Root against Miami and Philly in the Play-In, try to avoid the Bucks if possible, and pray to the Gods above that Denver isn’t waiting in the Finals. Does that sound good to everyone?

Certainly not, since that forgets the season’s other alias: a revenge tour.

Finding the calmest waters may seem like the way to go, but that mindset is arguably what made last season’s loss so demoralizing. Perhaps it’d be better if they puffed their chest out and asked impolitely for the league to bring it on.

Before last year’s playoffs began, it was an open question which out of the Celtics, 76ers and Bucks would make it out of the East, but very few thought Miami—with their historically mediocre 2022-2023 regular season—would actually challenge the triumvirate.

Then Jimmy Butler left his body for the better part of a week, and sent the Bucks home to rethink their lives. The Celtics rejoiced at seeing the lowly Atlanta Hawks in the first round, though they proved more complicated than expected. Then they fought a total war against the 76ers in the trenches of the second round, only emerging on the back of Major General Jayson Tatum’s heroics.

But the Bucks were gone, so the worst was already over, right? Facing the Miami Heat, the ESPN Basketball Power Index gave the Celtics a 97 percent chance of winning the series, a number that appalled me before the series even began.

“This is a preposterous number. Get this number out of my face.” I wrote just days before the disaster began. “I do not care what advanced-algorithmic-true-shooting-percentage-offensive/defensive-win-share-based wizardry this number is based on. Get it out of my face.”

Photo by Adam Glanzman/Getty Images

Nobody plugged into the league truly thought Miami had that small of a chance, though the Celtics were definitely favorites. But they were tepid favorites, not overwhelming ones. And then they lost, but somehow managed to stem the worst criticism by valiantly fighting back from 3-0 down to force a Game 7. Even simpler, they had a built-in excuse in Tatum’s first-minute ankle sprain.

This year’s playoff run has the chance to be the Celtics’ revenge for what must have felt like a biblical test of their patience. But it’s also revenge for the excuses, since the Celtics are clean out of them. And with such crushing expectations, it’s hard to know if they’ve been dealt a good hand or a bad one.

For the optimist, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity for Boston to win Banner 18 and exorcise their demons in one fell swoop. If that comes to pass, the fruits of their success would be boundless. They will have etched their names in history and opened up personal and professional doors many of them never imagined.

Additionally, the ever-present questioning of the Tatum-Brown core would cease forever. Fans—Celtics or otherwise—far and wide would be free to enjoy the duo for its undeniable greatness, and look back on it without reservation or even the slightest hint of sadness. And perhaps that’s how this all ends, only fate and fortune know for sure.

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Fortune has followed this team wherever it happens to go, so long as they don’t try to book any duck boats and close down Tremont Street. They’ve enjoyed an almost unheard of measure of consistency since 2017, with often outgunned and outmanned squads finding their way to the Eastern Conference Finals five times in the last seven years.

Of course, the degradation of Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward’s catastrophic injury aren’t exactly strokes of luck, but fate has always afforded the Celtics a puncher’s chance, even if they were fighting with a broken jaw or one arm tied behind their back.

Most of the Celtics’ playoff success until last year felt ahead of schedule, rather than just the natural progression of NBA history. Tatum and Brown were in their early 20s for much of their initial playoff success, and when the Celtics finally did make the Finals in 2022, it felt like a lot had broken right for them to get there.

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Almost nobody thought the 2021-2022 Celtics were one of the favorites in the East until they executed one of the great in-season turnarounds in NBA history, barely staying above .500 before ripping off a historic second half to end the season as the number two seed.

But plenty of fans and pundits alike saw the defending champion Milwaukee Bucks as the prohibitive favorite. If not them, the number one seeded Heat would be next on the list, with Kevin Durant and Irving’s Brooklyn Nets looming as an ever-dangerous seven seed.

But the Celtics made it out of the East, and fell to the dynastic Golden State Warriors in the Finals. But the sentiment after the fact was simple: the Celtics were still a work in progress, while the Warriors were a work of art. Nobody had a reason to believe that this team would take a step back, and—save for the year-long suspension of former head coach Ime Udoka—they didn’t.

Many fans will say “championship or bust” every year (as if teams like the Hornets wouldn’t like to just make the playoffs once in a while), but this season and the last have been certified championship-or-failure campaigns. In 2022, these Celtics had finally gotten over the hump on their fourth try, and now they just had to close the deal.

Then, in 2023, all hell broke loose on attempt number five, with the Heat defying the laws of physics and logic to oust the Celtics with one of the most statistically improbable shooting performances of the century. They were back to square one once again, and faced the ever-torturous question of teams that can taste greatness but not quite grasp it:

Be aggressive or stand pat?

It’s easy to cry apocalypse and demand radical changes, but even harder to keep calm and accept the less-dramatic future. Even down 3-0 to Miami, with Boston looking broken and ready for it all to be over, some level heads understood the cold, calculated reality.

“The Celtics… they actually are going to be one of the favorites to win the East next year. They just are,” said Ryen Russillo on the Bill Simmons Podcast the night the Celtics had just lost their third straight game to Miami.

“If they do nothing?,” replied Simmons. “If they just hire an expensive bench coach and keep Joe Mazz? You might be right.”

And Russillo was right. Had the Celtics just done nothing, the Bucks would still be an uncoordinated mess, Miami would still be worse, and James Harden still would have sabotaged Philadelphia with yet another trade demand. Had the Celtics kept Robert Williams III, Malcolm Brogdon, and Marcus Smart, they would still be on the short list of teams with a chance to win it all.

Photo by Brian Babineau/NBAE via Getty Images

But President of Basketball Operations Brad Stevens waited exactly 12 days to answer that question. Before the Denver Nuggets had even finished their beers from the parade, Stevens shipped Malcolm Brogdon to the Clippers in a three-team deal to acquire Kristaps Porzingis, who he saw as the missing big man to unlock the Celtics’ true potential.

And then, roughly one sip of beer later, that trade fell through, and Stevens was forced to deal Smart instead of Brogdon, shattering the hearts of many fans who had seen Smart grow and become a pillar of the team and greater Boston community. But this is a business, and Stevens had found his guy.

“This was risky,” Stevens said to ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne. “But as Jay Larranaga used to tell me, ‘If we’re not trying to improve, we’ll stop being good.’”

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This simple reality—that success is never assured—has come to define Celtics excellence for over a decade. Complacency has been the enemy of progress ever since the Championship-winning core from 2008 hit its expiration date. And the rabid fight against stagnation has the Celtics ready to compete for a title, this time without any built-in excuses.

Stevens had big shoes to fill when legendary President of Basketball Operations Danny Ainge left Boston to go fix the Utah Jazz. Ainge had a history of aggressiveness in the face of often emotionally complex situations, such as his decision to deal Celtics legends Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett when it had become clear they were further down the tracks than the Celtics could stomach.

That trade—which netted Boston roughly the entire Brooklyn Nets draft future—has come to define the last seven years of Celtics basketball, with those picks resulting in two All-NBA caliber wings in Brown and Tatum. And Tatum is only a Celtic today because of another bold trade with Philadelphia to swap the first pick for the third.

Photo by Maddie Malhotra/Getty Images

Stevens’ brilliance as Ainge’s successor has come through this same mindset, though it’s important to note that he was dealt pocket aces with Tatum and Brown. Within the NBA’s salary cap structure, by far the biggest advantage a team can get is to draft a championship-level core and then resign them with Bird rights, essentially affording the team much wider flexibility to build around them.

For most teams in the NBA, making “aggressive” moves usually means clearing their ledger of draft picks to bring in stars to support or in lieu of a homegrown alpha. This strategy hit its apex with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2020, vaulting them to a championship just one year after trading the farm for Anthony Davis. But the same mindset also finds the Brooklyn Nets in NBA purgatory, without any top-flight talent and without their own first-round draft pick until 2028.

Because of their unprecedented luck with Tatum and Brown arriving in back-to-back years on teams already good enough to support them, the Celtics have been able to consistently compete without clearing their ledger of first round draft picks. The Kyrie Irving and Kemba Walker eras came and went, but the Celtics had enough young talent in the bank that they never could justify looking to trade it for something more “surefire.”

Because ultimately, after the flameouts of Irving, Hayward, and Walker, the Celtics knew nothing could be more secure than what they had in the building. After making the 2022 Finals, this conviction only grew.

“Some said split.” Marcus Smart tweeted, alongside a picture of himself with his two brothers in arms. “We said family.”

Stevens bought into that family, and let them run things with only the minor introduction of super sixth man Malcolm Brogdon off the bench for the following run. But the loss to Miami exposed that something with that infrastructure was broken, off-kilter, or perhaps had just reached its limit.

And Celtics owner Wyc Grousbeck could feel it during Game 7.

“I sat there probably the whole second half of that game starting to think about it. And then I took two days to let everything settle down and then went and met with Brad Stevens and Joe Mazzulla,” Grousbeck said to WEEI in October. “I just said, ‘We’re not bringing back the same team.’”

How involved Grousbeck actually was in the decisions to move Smart, Williams III and Brogdon cannot and will not be known. But he and Stevens clearly understood what NBA history was telling them: you can never assume success will just continue.

Just ask the 2012 Oklahoma City Thunder, historically stacked with Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden all entering their physical prime. They lost the 2012 NBA Finals to LeBron James and the super team Miami Heat, but the Western Conference looked like it was about to run through OKC for the foreseeable future.

And then the wheels of history turned faster than the Thunder were ready for. Harden’s contract negotiations broke down and they traded him to Houston, where he would go on to become one of the great scorers in league history and win the 2018 MVP award. OKC would fail to make it back to the Finals, and could never have expected a Warriors dynasty would emerge to steal their future and their superstar in Durant.

You never know when your window is going to close. Stars can sense organizational apathy and will run for the hills, so Stevens went out and supercharged the roster with a salvo of hyper-aggressive moves that turned the Celtics into the odds-on favorites. They weren’t about to be passed by.

Some say process over product, but in the NBA that thinking hits a wall after a while. Boston has been a well-oiled organizational machine since the mid-2000s, but the lack of recent championship results is eventually going to make touting the process impossible. Before any books are written on the Celtics’ brilliant front office strategy, they’ll have to their own book.

The buck stops with rings. No matter how abhorrent that culture may be, it’s the one we live in. Historically, nobody will take this team seriously unless they win it all, which introduces the cold world of expectations and consequences:

To not win the NBA Finals would be a failure. And the fallout may be even worse.

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Pressure and time creates diamonds, but it can also cause extinction-level events if we aren’t careful.

No team even approaches the level of pressure the Celtics are under to succeed, but you wouldn’t know it just by looking at everyone’s accounting books. The Phoenix Suns and Los Angeles Clippers both have significantly more future draft capital invested in winning it all, and don’t have the recent success of other all-in teams like the Lakers or Bucks to fall back on.

But pressure is the sum of a team’s stakes and expectations, not merely a measure of how many chips they’ve pushed to the center of the table. The Celtics have comparatively little future assets tied up in this playoff run, a testament to their tremendous fortune and organizational competence.

Yet infinitely more is expected of them. Despite their commitments, nobody expects the Clippers to topple Denver nor have the Suns looked like anything close to an actual contender for months now. The Celtics, on the other hand, have offered nothing but reasons to believe for five months, with advanced and simple metrics showing that they are one of the best regular-season teams of all time.

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They are expected to win the title, and while their draft capital stakes aren’t too high, the narrative investment is through the roof. Should the Celtics fail once again, off-season discourse would no longer be ruling on the proceeding season.

It would be ruling on eternity.

This is how it works. A team, usually with a top-5-ish player in the league knocks on the door year after year but can never finish the job. Then, after three or four years of this, the questions change tenor. It’s not about last season or even next season anymore. It’s about forever.

No longer is Steven A. Smith doing an off-season segment on First Take about whether the Celtics are going to win the title next year; he’s doing a segment wondering if this team will ever win it all. Charles Barkley wonders on Inside the NBA if Jayson Tatum can truly be a bus driver. The Athletic makes a list of the worst contracts in the league with both Brown and Holiday making the cut. Bleacher Report produces six articles with fake trades involving Kristaps Porzingis or Derrick White, and someone—maybe me—writes an article wondering if the Celtics should blow it up.

(I promise I won’t do that.)

Deep breath. That would all be hysterical and divorced from reality, given that the Celtics would still be extremely well-positioned in the East next year regardless of what happens. But the energy will shift downwards.

As with every season, there will be degrees of success and failure, as a first round exit to Miami would be uniquely catastrophic while a seven-game Finals loss to Denver wouldn’t be nearly as futuristically problematic. It would be crushing, but wouldn’t invite as many questions about eternity.

Bostonians are generally uninterested in eternity. The Red Sox did their dance with it for 86 years, and once people start wondering if the team will win again in their lifetime, things can get dark. If the Celtics don’t at least make it out of the East with this team, it’s going to be a hard summer.

But that’s the kind of risk you have to accept with a team this talented. Being out of excuses is scary, but it also means they’ve done everything right thus far. Ultimately, the Celtics will have to live and die with the choices they’ve made, which—at least right now—look like great ones.

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The 2023-2024 Celtics had the best offensive rating and the third-best net rating in NBA history. They were 37-4 at home. They won the Eastern Conference by 14 games. They had more 30-point leads than 10-point deficits. They never lost three games in a row.

And they did it all for 82 straight games. There was never a significant hiccup, never a moment where they seemed to falter for more than a moment. And each time they did, they came back with a vengeance. This team didn’t spiral out of control, didn’t indulge in any personal antics and steered clear of injuries and drama from Game 1 to Game 82.

In truth, they only risk the biggest letdown in recent history because they are so unimpeachably great. Tepid optimism would be disingenuous, since this team has done nothing but destroy people since late October. They have all the tools, and they’ve provided plenty of evidence that they can win Banner 18.

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So, will they?

If you ask the statisticians, probably. The Celtics are first in the ESPN Basketball Power Index by a considerable margin, and have by far the easiest path to the Finals on paper of any team. This is reflected in two more calculations, with Basketball Reference’s model giving the Celtics a 59.4 percent chance of winning the Finals and The Ringer’s NBA Odds Machine ratcheting that up to 63 percent.

What about betting markets? Well, DraftKings gives the Celtics +160 odds of winning the title and -175 odds to win the Eastern Conference, meaning they are more likely than not making it out of the East and have a solid 8:5 chance of winning the Finals. Not quite the 60 percent that the math world was offering, but not too shabby either.

But basketball isn’t played on a spreadsheet, and eventually all these numbers will wither away in the face of actually having to get it done. In the week leading up to the first round, crunched numbers can have their time to shine, but at some point, fans just have to believe.

Belief is a hard thing to do without a proof of concept. It’s Charlie Brown running up to kick the football over and over again hoping that — this time for sure — Lucy isn’t going to pull it away. It’s crawling through a tunnel without knowing how far away the other side is, even when those around you say there is no other side.

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But believing is also an expression of gratitude, and these Celtics have earned at least that much. Last season, it took until the last two minutes of Game 6 against Philly for me to truly believe, and until the Celtics fought back in Game 4 against Miami to believe again. They hadn’t yet earned my trust, but they grabbed it when they had to.

This year’s team has offered no such doubt. They’ve held my faith since the opening tip, and have drawn on their history dating all the way back to Avery Bradley’s shot in 2017 to show that these Celtics are the final form of that team. It’s been a long, windy road, but now it’s a drag race to the finish line, and to the conclusion of that story.

I believe they are the ones who will write the last chapter. And if now isn’t the time to believe, will it ever be?