One must look at the Celtics long term assets to determine the overall success of Boston’s 2016-17 season
The Brooklyn Nets have featured prominently in the Celtics’ immediate history. Last week they secured their place as the worst team in basketball, ensuring that the Celtics will have the best odds at the top pick in the upcoming draft. Then on Monday night, Boston’s victory over Brooklyn gave the Celtics sole possession of the top spot in the Eastern Conference.
It was a pleasing string of events, and at a macro level, Boston is in about as good a position as any team could possibly hope to be. They’re going to finish a 50-win season with a real shot at a number one seed. They are also likely to have a top-5 (if not top-3) pick in the next two drafts, and are loaded with relatively young talent. They are, to put it simply, a very good team with a cache of recently drafted players and upcoming picks in the pipeline.
And yet, there is a real hesitancy to celebrate the team’s strong long-term position, and it’s driven by an assumed ceiling on the Celtics’ prospects in the present. It is the culmination of a season-long fear that nothing really matters because LeBron James is just too good. Cleveland’s dominance last Saturday was a painful flashpoint in that narrative.
It’s not entirely clear just how much of a problem Boston’s problem really is, and it’s even less clear what the appropriate solution is, though most supporters fall into one of two camps. The first wants the Celtics to push their chips into the middle of the table, turn their future assets into a star-level player, and compete in the present. Boston passed on this strategy at the deadline, but could presumably still execute it in the off season.
The second camp considers the NBA’s best teams to be so unassailable that even the addition of any available star would not be enough to push the Celtics into true contention. The appropriate strategy is thus, to use all of Boston’s upcoming draft picks, ride out the end of the Al Horford contract (and possibly new deals for Isaiah Thomas and Avery Bradley) as a team that is good but not great, and build a real contender for some time in the 2020’s. At the moment this appears to be Danny Ainge’s preferred approach.
It’s hard to argue with the results thus far. Demanding more from a team that has succeeded so significantly seems unfair, but LeBron is still looming (and after him the Warriors), and the specter of a theoretical Jimmy Butler or Paul George trade is too. Boston had a chance to make themselves better, and they deliberately chose not to. We won’t know if that was the right decision for likely another decade, but any playoff exit will inevitably make it seem like a questionable one, and the overarching narrative that teams ought to compete for championships or nothing won’t make it any better.
That perspective, for all its logic, is fairly damning for every team that’s not Golden State, Cleveland, or, to a lesser degree, San Antonio. The Celtics deserve to be celebrated for their success AND their future orientation. The organization is set up to be very good for a very long time, and at some point when the front office feels like they have a chance to make a legitimate run at the title, they are likely to be in a very good position to do so.
Boston wasn’t ready to mortgage the future to make a run right now, and choosing to do so couldn’t have possibly been a simple decision. Finding the right balance between present and future isn’t a challenge that is going anywhere any time soon. It’s an enviable dilemma for sure, but it highlights just how difficult it is to compete meaningfully while maintaining optimal opportunities for the future. The Celtics are, for lack of a better term, trying to have their cake and eat it too. We shouldn’t criticize the fact that they chose not to stuff their faces this year before we see how things play out in the long run.
That isn’t to say that Boston made the right decision in hold pat at the deadline. In fact, if their goal is to win a championship this year, it would be nearly impossible to make that argument. Rather, this is a challenge to the commitment to the contention/irrelevance dichotomy- the idea that a team has somehow failed if it doesn’t win a championship in the current year. That’s a relatively myopic perspective, and it’s not fair to apply it to assessing the Celtics season.
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Certainly another first-round loss, and possibly anything shy of the Eastern Conference Finals berth would be upsetting, but there is something to be said for how strong this team has looked while simultaneously building its potential moving forward. This year has been a success, regardless of postseason outcome.