Boston Celtics: An Alternate Route

For quite some time, I had been angry with the 2015-2016 Boston Celtics. I’d seen their sole focus on winning every game as short-sighted. My steadfast feeling had been that the Celtics quickest road to championship success had laid in the team investing in the development of its youngest players, not giving valuable playing time to veteran players to win a few extra games.

Only right now, those few extra games are coming faster and faster. There’s an open stretch of road up ahead and the Celtics look primed and ready to find a way around and through the eventual obstacles they’ll encounter.

I never thought these Celtics would play so well. I wholeheartedly believed the team would finish this season much as it did last year, on the receiving end of a late invitation to the playoffs — but when the Celtics showed up, they would quickly and unceremoniously be shown the door.

That’s all that fans can realistically expect when their team squeaks into the playoffs as the seventh or eighth seed. What good would getting swept again do us?

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Yet, the Celtics currently sport the third best record in the Eastern Conference. If they can secure the third playoff seeding by season’s end, in the first round, they’ll go head to head with the sixth seed, which figures to be an altogether underwhelming opponent.

Today, the sixth seed is a middling Indian Pacers team that has gone 5-5 in its last ten games and is the definition of a one trick pony, relying on star player, Paul George, to do everything and a little more. Other likely first round playoff match-ups for Boston presently include the Miami Heat, Chicago Bulls, and Atlanta Hawks, all of which are flawed and very beatable for a Celtics team on the rise.

In the second round, Boston would likely have to go head to head with one of only two “elite” teams in the Eastern Conference, LeBron James‘ Cleveland Cavaliers or the Toronto Raptors. Three weeks ago, I didn’t believe the Celtics stood chance against Cleveland or Toronto, but then, Brad Stevens’ squad compiled a 9-1 record, beating their opponents by an average of double digits, before dropping a close one in Milwaukee.

The last time the Celtics went 9-1 over a ten game stretch was the 2011-2012 season, which saw Boston hold a 3-2 lead against the Heat in the Eastern Conference Finals. That team went on to drop the final two games of that series.

This year’s Celtics’ recent run reached its most dramatic point when, as the final seconds ticked off the clock, Avery Bradley drilled a three-pointer to help the Celtics best a Cavs team that swept Boston out of the first round in last year’s playoffs. The win was the team’s biggest in recent memory.

Boston’s winning ways have helped me see there’s an alternate route for the Celtics to take to contend for a championship — and to do so this summer. It hit me moments after Avery Bradley hit his game winner in Cleveland. It was then that I knew exactly what the Celtics needed to do. The Celtics needed to make a trade.

Aside from the Cavaliers and Raptors, the Eastern Conference playoff picture looks a lot like the open road. There’s just not much to slow a good team down. As constituted, the Celtics are talented enough to cruise all the way into the second round of the playoffs. The road ahead gets a lot harder, though, with Cleveland and Toronto looming.

But the Celtics find themselves well-positioned to find a way around and through the eventual road blocks that the Cavs and Raptors represent, and into the NBA Finals. That’s right, the Finals.

The Celtics current collection of assets is historic. Never before has an NBA franchise had such a bevy of drafts picks and young talent as the Celtics do now. The team has the fuel to take it where it wants to go. And assembling some combination of its assets and packaging them to another team for, if not a great player, a good one, is the direction the Celtics should head in.

Boston already has enough of a foundation in place that doing so would sufficiently improve the team to compete with the likes of the Cavaliers and Raptors in earnest come playoff time. While Cleveland and Toronto look awfully secure in their positions atop the East’s standings, neither team inspires the level of fear and respect that conference leaders usually do.

Lebron’s Cavaliers aren’t the absolute barrier that they seemed just a few short weeks ago. The Cavs recently parted ways with head coach, David Blatt, only seven months removed from when he led a bruised and battered Cavs team to a 2-1 finals lead against the Golden State Warriors in the Finals. This move has resulted in the Cavs’ front office receiving scathing criticism.

Now, with less than half of a season’s worth of games remaining, the Cavs new head coach, Tyronn Lue, is conducting an overhaul of the team’s playing style. None of this bodes well for the Cavaliers, who already had plenty to worry about, given the extensive injury history of two of their top three players, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love.

Despite their recent success, the Raptors aren’t an overly intimidating obstacle, either. Like the Celtics, Toronto was swept in the first round of the 2015 playoffs. The difference was the Raptors should have beaten their opponent, the Washington Wizards.

The team from Canada finished the 2014-2015 regular season with a better record than the Wizards and had home court advantage in the playoff series. Still, Washington dismantled the Raptors, not just sweeping them, but winning each game in the series by an average of 14 points. Toronto’s roster hasn’t undergone anything resembling meaningful change in the time since.

Next: Marcus Smart Needs to Stay Aggressive

Boston’s strong play of late and the promising circumstances the team finds itself in have turned this skeptic into a believer.

The Celtics are only one good player away from being en route to the Finals.

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