About a month ago, my venerable colleague Bill Sy wrote that these Celtics were hard to watch. His critique wasn’t about stats or success, but rather aesthetics. Analytical bully-ball was often very successful, but came at the cost of the beauty of ball and man movement.
Out of the quagmire of endless Celtics-watching, Bill dug out the point exactly: we don’t just want the Celtics to be good, we want them to look good too. We want to tell our kids about this team, how they soared around the court with precision and intention, unlike anything we had ever seen.
What we don’t want to tell them was how these Celtics won 65 games because about 79 percent of the time they drowned their opponents in an unending tempest of threes, and how the roster was constructed to relentlessly exploit that advantage.
“When I was your age, the Celtics had size and shooting everywhere. Not only that, but they shot the highest volume of threes in the league to create favorable matchups!”
“Wow, that’s so cool, Dad!”
When Bill planted his flag, the Celtics were 15-5 and had just lost to the Indiana Pacers in a pretty unwatchable game. But presumably spurred by someone in the Celtics locker room printing out copies of the piece and plastering it on everyone’s lockers, the Celtics immediately ripped off 11 wins in the 13 games since, complete with some super-watchable performances out west and a Derrick White All-Star campaign. Who doesn’t love that?
December was such a fun month of Celtics basketball that I wanted to revisit the notion of the Celtics’ watchability in the name of having a growth mindset. On vibes alone, the Celtics have been very watchable recently, save for a few truly horrid quarters that can bring about distressing images of the 2023 Eastern Conference Finals. But on balance, I’ve personally had remarkably few aesthetic notes.
It’s true that December gave us more time with a team that was probably a bit too new in November. The Celtics are overwhelmingly talented, capable of obliterating opponents but also of confusing themselves. Last year, a Jayson Tatum or Jaylen Brown search-and-destroy isolation was usually the best option in a pinch. Derrick White hadn’t yet asserted himself, and Marcus Smart was a less-efficient but no-less-willing offensive creator. They had some big guns, but nowhere near enough guns.
Before the offseason, the Celtics had just finished losing one of the most inexplicable playoff series in franchise…
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