The Boston Celtics have now passed the halfway point in their 2018-19 campaign. With 40 games left, what will we see out of this team going forward?
The 2018-19 Boston Celtics are not the team we thought they would be before the season started. Many, myself included, thought that this team would be an unstoppable juggernaut that would lay waste to the league en route to a showdown with the Golden State Warriors in the finals, some pundits even considered the notion of an Eastern Conference Championship a foregone conclusion. Celtics fans have had the wind taken out of their sails this season as the team has struggled with chemistry, rotation and consistency issues, and continues to be bitten by the injury bug.
Everyone assumed that the Celtics’ would continue to trend upward after last year’s fairytale season, but this is the NBA, nothing is given to you, nothing is certain, and as Celtics fans know intimately well, the whole trajectory of a season can change in an instant.
Earlier this year I examined how the team had measured up through a quarter of the NBA season by looking at some of the advanced statistics to see what the team did well, what they did poorly, and how they could improve. Since starting 10-10, the Celtics have improved to 25-17 and are 5th in the Eastern Conference; whilst still a far cry from the work of basketball art that the ever-opinionated and slightly biased Bill Simmons thought the team would be, they have entrenched themselves firmly in the upper tier of the conference and are 6.5 games behind the 1st placed Toronto Raptors.
After 42 games, a relatively clear picture of this incarnation of the Celtics begins to take shape, and there are several areas of concern for fans, but the most troubling of all, is that the overarching identity of the Celtics is that they don’t really have an identity, and to reduce this great sport to a platitude, you don’t go far in the NBA without an identity.
This piece, which is the spiritual successor to my quarter-season review will look at what the Celtics have done well up until this point, what they have done poorly, what they can improve on, and the random tidbits, nuances and individual wrinkles that make each NBA season a living, breathing organism.