Then, they won the title.<\/p>\n
And somehow, two years later, we\u2019re back to asking whether the Jays era has underachieved.<\/p>\n
The standard is still the standard<\/p>\n
The Celtics are and should be held to a ridiculous standard. That\u2019s part of the deal here in Boston.<\/p>\n
This franchise is strictly focused on banners, not vibes, which is why a first-round exit after blowing a 3-1 lead to Philadelphia was and is awful. It should still bother people. I know it still bothers me.<\/p>\n
Noa Dalzell, Senior Writer here at CelticsBlog, put it well on her latest episode of You Got Boston<\/a>. She said she is \u201cnot excusing their loss this past season,\u201d adding, \u201cThey should not have blown a 3-1 lead.\u201d That is the correct baseline. The Celtics were too good and too well-positioned to lose that series, even in a season that plenty of people spent months calling a gap year.<\/p>\n The issue is what happens after the disappointment settles in. A bad ending has a way of walking backward through time and staining everything before it. Suddenly a decade of contention becomes a decade of missed chances. A title becomes \u201conly one.\u201d Deep playoff runs become evidence for prosecution.<\/p>\n Noa pushed back on that framing too, saying, \u201cIf you say that they underachieved, then everybody has underachieved except for the Golden State Warriors since 2015.\u201d<\/p>\n She\u2019s right. Since 2015, the Warriors are the only franchise to win multiple titles.<\/p>\n Granted, not every team should be graded the same way. Some cores are better positioned for sustained excellence, like the modern-day Thunder or the aforementioned Warriors. Some titles feel more like the product of having the right pieces in the right place for one magical run, like the Kawhi-led Raptors or the 2021 Milwaukee Bucks.<\/p>\n But the larger point holds. Ever since the Warriors dynasty ended, no one has been able to stack chips.<\/p>\n If the argument is that every great player or duo who fails to become a dynasty has failed, then nearly the entire league has spent the last decade failing.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a pretty miserable way to watch basketball.<\/p>\n The r\u00e9sum\u00e9 grew quickly and quietly<\/p>\n One strange thing about the Tatum-Brown era is how quickly winning became background noise in their larger story.<\/p>\n By the time they broke through in 2024, the Celtics had already been to four conference finals with Tatum and Brown together, plus the 2022 NBA Finals. They had made the playoffs every year of Tatum\u2019s career. They had never finished below .500 with both of them on the roster. Tatum had already made five All-Star teams and four All-NBA teams, while Brown had three All-Star selections, and an All-NBA nod.<\/p>\n Even this season, which started under the shadow of Tatum\u2019s Achilles tear, somehow became another reminder of how high this group\u2019s floor has been. Brown stepped into the heaviest version of his role yet and led the Celtics to a 56-win season. That is not normal. Most teams lose a player like Tatum and spend the season looking like someone unplugged the router. Instead, Boston stayed in the mix to the point where it felt like just another normal season of winning in a very abnormal year.<\/p>\n Boston has gotten so used to deep runs that fans sometimes treat them like table stakes. The conference finals became a place the Celtics were supposed to be every year, like it was some recurring calendar invite. That is an absurd privilege.<\/p>\n There are fanbases that spend decades hoping to draft one player as good as Brown or Tatum. Boston got both in back-to-back years. Then, they both stayed. Then, they improved. Then, they won it all, together.<\/p>\n A lot of Celtics fans are old enough to remember when the present felt bad and the future looked worse.<\/p>\n The late 90s were ugly. The early 2000s had Paul Pierce trying to drag half-built rosters into relevance while the rest of us tried to convince ourselves that maybe this was the year everything finally clicked for Mark Blount. Before Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen arrived, plenty of seasons felt like they were over before Thanksgiving. There\u2019s a different kind of frustration that comes with watching a contender fall short, but at least that frustration comes from proximity to something real.<\/p>\n
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