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.

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.

Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images

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…