Exits: The joy and fury the Celtics are due
Boston was going to be fine, until its front office decided it wasn't.
This was just going to be a tidy trace back to when things started to slump for the Celtics this season, was mostly going to be me trying to remember what was hardly that memorable. The biggest story of the Celtics’ year should have been the cost of what playing this season is going to mean for Jason Tatum, long term. Lungs that need a jump-start before games. Could’ve been a good time to reconcile want over need and how often that’s gonna get you in trouble, how often that’s going to harm the bystanders of that desire. Maybe a quick mention of Kyrie planting a foot on Lucky’s face and grinding out that smug little Nixon smirk like a cigarette.
Because otherwise, it was a dull season in Boston.
The team’s spelunking down the standings overshadowed by the Lakers doing the exact same. Jaylen Brown’s season-ending injury, a torn ligament in his wrist, overshadowed by another injury. His own injury. A sprained ankle from an in-game collision with Tatum. The two of them running full-tilt toward one another without seeing the other there, barrelling closer and closer, kicking their own legs out from under them. A painful and almost tenderly oblivious analogy for the team’s season.
But today, maybe in the white-knuckled need of Danny Ainge not to fade too fast into golf course ghost obscurity, or a front office’s collective panic at appearing mostly fine instead of a menace, the Celtics decided to make their own news out of their favourite subject: themselves.
The Celtics were fine. Maybe not against a Nets team stretching their new playoff legs like murderous fawns, but in the grand scheme of a season gone entirely to wash, fine.
But Boston is never really about the players, is it?
Boston is obsessed with its own legacy, with how long a shadow it’s casting even as its sun is steadily slipping away. So, in response to the perceived threat of some much needed offseason introspection, the Celtics took a grenade to where a bike wrench would do.
Look, I know the story is that Brad Stevens lost the locker room, I have my own inside sources too. But to go from not wanting to say anything to the players in the room, to being the one deciding what players are in that room, seems an advanced exercise in delusion. Stevens as president of Boston’s basketball ops, as much an example of the western white male’s wont of failing upwards, at the very least seems so lazy. You want a new job but you don’t want to go looking. You crawl up inside the thing you’re trying to get clear of.
Ainge. Ainge isn’t even worth talking about. When Ainge said that he’d never heard anything about racism, or that Boston is widely regarded as a sneering backwoods (I’m mostly talking about the Garden) in his two decades and change with the team, it comes with the same sense of most CEOs and presidents in the jobs I’ve ever had showing up once a year and stumbling around, getting lost while looking for the bathroom, locking themselves in a utility closet. A real, “Do I know you? Do you work for me?” way of understanding the world.
And where there’s carrion from a team self-cannibalizing, there’s Jason Kidd.
At present, Kidd’s track record for swooping into panicky rebuilds and dysfunctional teams is better than his coaching record’s ever been, so the most worrying thing about the Celtics and Kidd’s name being floated is that if there’s any semblance of truth to it, he stands to inherit the most promising team he’s ever grifted. The grift can’t be all on Kidd though, it’s too tenured of a racket. The cyclical and shrinking pool of NBA head coaches jockeying for their next job feels primordial in how stagnant a practice, with a very slim handful of men (I was going to write people, but that’d be as inaccurate in point of fact as in optimism) signalling at all that they enjoy the role, their teams, the idea that theirs is a worthwhile way to spend time. That there are still occasional flashes of joy and moments of reverence at what unfolds in front of them most nights.
Because it’s joy, most of all, that the Celtics need this offseason. Reassurance, a steady and competent plan, the wherewithal to recognize that this season was over — aside from revenue — before it started, but certainly joy.
Tatum has played some of the best and most innovative basketball of his career while in the grip of long-Covid, the kind of crafty, confident development teams hope for from their star players any time, let alone under duress of a diagnosis no one, league or team side, seems willing to give. Brown is a marvel, succinct and sure on court and off (though no one in Boston appreciates the latter). Kemba Walker is going to be fast and compelling again, eventually, probably as soon as he can stop being made to sprint uphill on a bad knee and hip, and, in his final postgame of the season, Marcus Smart said more succinctly what I’ve been trying to: “I think we’re alright, but that’s not my decision to make.”
As much as there is something to rightly lament in the lack of autonomy of direction the players feel they have with their own team, what Smart underscored wasn’t mournful. It was a fair and succinct reading of a season that for him, and for probably all of his teammates, couldn’t and should never have tried to measure up against the anxiety and grief in the day-to-day lives they were asked to dip seamlessly in and out of for some games.
“It’s been a lot,” Smart said, “injuries on top of injuries, guys not being able to play together. A lot of personal stuff for individuals. It’s life. Things more important than basketball. But you still have to be professional. You have to come to work and you have to put a smile on your face and you have to dig deep and figure it out.”
I take it back. The Celtics can use some rage, too. Shared around with plenty of other players in the league but certainly, hearing Smart say he’d lost five people within three months of each other this year and that he still felt the need to be professional, to come to work and go through the movements to make everybody comfortable. To hold Smart’s memory of this season against Ainge and Stevens’ versions of it, the ease of their actions within a team they have existed so wholly outside of, does well up a fury the Celtics are due for. Here’s hoping it doesn’t run dry.