Will the 2022-23 Boston Celtics season be considered a success?

As far as I can tell, there are exactly six possible outcomes to any Boston Celtics season:

1. Miss the playoffs
2. First-round loss
3. Second-round loss
4. Eastern Conference Finals loss
5. NBA Finals loss
6. Duck Boat parade

Now, option one would have been a catastrophe given the promise of last season, and option two requires the Atlanta Hawks to execute a 3-1 comeback, something Trae Young got underway with an April 25 win in Boston. If the Hawks pull this off, it will be like a meteor hit the parquet floor.

Nevertheless, Boston Celtics fans worldwide now stare down five possibilities, all asking the same question: will the season be a success?

As with most oversimplifications, I reject the championship-or-bust thesis, even for a team that fell two games short one year ago. But in the interest of preserving our collective sanity throughout the harrowing and sometimes torturous experience known as a deep playoff run, I present a framework for determining if the season was a success, regardless of the outcome, and is guaranteed to be 100% accurate.

Let’s begin with a definition: Success in the NBA has never been as simple as winning a championship. In Boston, it has often meant that, but success cannot be confined to such a simple interpretation, even in the City of Champions.

Take the San Antonio Spurs who, for example, would probably declare 2023 a total success if their efforts to lose every game imaginable resulted in the number-one pick and thus Victor Wembanyama.

The Oklahoma City Thunder may find success in getting their young and extremely raw core of lanky people some much-needed reps in important games, and confused jumbles like the Toronto Raptors might just fire their coach and call it a win. Success in the NBA is as straightforward as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel.

In Boston, though, it’s traditionally been about the banners. Losing seasons — and God forbid several in a row — is not tolerated. Thankfully, the only time in the last 16 years the Boston Celtics have missed the playoffs was in 2014, when a 25-57 disasterclass was captained by leading scorer Jeff Green. However, an impassable barrier, known as LeBron James, stone-walled the Cs in the Eastern Conference Finals for the better part of a decade, and so the banners we crave have eluded us.

However, it would be hard to say that none of those LeBron-foiled seasons were successful, especially when stars like Kyrie Irving or Isaiah Thomas missed the series’ with an injury and a 19-year-old Jayson Tatum was dunking on LeBron.

It is thus more useful to rank success in degrees, and for our purposes, there are five: disaster, complete and total failure (0); awful, extremely disappointing (1); bad, a step backward (2); solid, but no or only slight improvement (3); great, with real improvement (4).

Without further ado—and there has been much ado—let’s discuss these degrees of success as they apply to the five remaining outcomes of the season, and hopefully, then we can all happily watch the remaining playoff games, blissfully content in our mathematical understanding of the season’s many ebbs and flows. Or maybe we’ll pull our hair out anyway, but here goes.

Outcome 1: Boston Celtics First-Round Loss

If this were to actually happen, the Celtics season would reek so thoroughly of disappointment that it would need to be washed with fire for the next seven months straight. I don’t even want to imagine this one.

Degrees of Success: 0

Outcome 2: Boston Celtics Second-Round Loss

For the Celtics, the Philadelphia 76ers are like a game of Whack-a-Mole. The Cs have taken their lunch money for years, conceding one single postseason game to them in two series’ since The Process actually started making the playoffs.

This is probably because with a nucleus of Joel Embiid and [insert secondary scorer/facilitator here], the 76ers have generally matched up horribly with the Celtics. They generally rely on solid guard play — this year from James Harden and Tyrese Maxey — to complement Embiid’s physical dominance down low. What they lack, pretty much entirely, are athletic wing defenders to guard Tatum or Jaylen Brown one-on-one when the Celtics go small and spread Embiid out to the perimeter.

This is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad way to play the Celtics. Couple that with the prevalence of warm bodies to throw at Embiid, the Celtics hold the clear upper hand if this series is played straight up.

However, this in turn adds significantly higher degrees of trauma if the 76ers manage to win the series. Most of the time, losing a playoff series to the NBA MVP and Co. would not be cause for alarm. But the Celtics can and should win this series handily, so a second-round loss would carry a serious aura of failure.

And historically, second-round losses for major contenders are often emblematic of failure. With the Milwaukee Bucks down 3-1 to the Miami Heat, as I’m writing this, the Celtics may be the favorite to win the NBA Finals. And any Clippers fan would tell you that a second-round exit can make that expectation hit like 20 tons of bricks. Just ask Blake Griffin.

Degrees of success: 4-6 game loss: 0, 7 game loss: 1

Outcome 3: Boston Eastern Conference Finals Loss

I’ll refrain from speculating about whom the Celtics could face here, but fans should be acutely aware of how losing in the Eastern Conference Finals feels. On paper, making the NBA’s final four is a major achievement. But recently, we’ve seen Conference Final teams fizzle out hilariously shortly after their ascension, such as the Atlanta Hawks from 2021 and the Dallas Mavericks from 2022.

These cases make membership in the club of Conference Finalists less prestigious than it may seem, and I, for one, have seen plenty of Celtics teams in the ECF in the last ten years. A loss here would mean a return to the status quo, and introduce the risk of Jaylen Brown questioning if he can win in Boston as he approaches free agency.

And despite promising not to speculate about the opponent, who this loss comes to would matter when determining success. A fully healthy Bucks team would be the least egregious, while losing to the Heat would be borderline apocalyptic, considering how overmatched they would be talent-wise. There are many permutations to consider, but here’s my best guess:

Degrees of Success: Loss to Bucks w/Giannis: 2, Loss to Heat: 0, ANY other type of loss: 1

Outcome 4: Boston Celtics NBA Finals Loss

Well, well, well. Here we are again. Losing in the NBA Finals…again would be extremely frustrating. It’s a different kind of pain from falling short in a previous round, as last year’s success at finally getting out of the East would not hold nearly as much water this go around.

The blood, sweat, tears, and muscle ligaments required to get to the NBA Finals is grueling. Tatum apparently played last year with a partially broken wrist, and Robert Williams played through a knee injury for much of the playoffs that caused him to miss a good chunk of this season. To come that far…again, and then lose…again, would put miles on the team that wouldn’t just go away. The Sisyphean nature of this outcome also asks a morbid question: when do the players start wondering if it is possible? I would never speak another curse into existence, but it would start to exist in the Boston psyche.

Nevertheless, an NBA Finals loss is the first outcome that can at least approach something positive. If nothing else, returning to the gates of the promised land shows persistence, the #1 ingredient for winning championships. However, there are two opponents from out west that could ruin this positivity.

If the Boston Celtics lose to the Golden State Warriors…again, it will show an inability to exorcise our demons and strike a crushing blow to the confidence of the Celtics’ much more talented roster.

And if the Celtics lose to the Los Angeles Lakers—our great historical rival, this time complete with formerly-unrelated rival LeBron James—in the NBA Finals, I don’t know if I would ever go outside again.

Degrees of Success: Loss (any # of games): 3, Loss to Warriors: 2, Loss to Lakers: -1

Outcome 5: Boston Celtics Duck Boat Parade

I don’t believe in curses, jinxing, knocking on wood, or crossing one’s fingers. But I do believe that speculating publicly about whether or not winning an NBA Championship is a success is ridiculous, and may incur the wrath of the Basketball gods.

So I’m going to stop this one right here.

Degrees of Success: 4 (obviously)

For Boston Celtics fans, this should provide a fairly useful framework for thinking about our potential destinies. However, in the multiverse of NBA playoff scenarios, there are infinitely many storylines or ancillary outcomes that I did not think of, mention, or was simply too scared to consider. But hopefully, this can act as a springboard for the eventual tab on Basketball Reference entitled “DoS” (Degree of Success), with every season in NBA history evaluated from 0-4 for each team. It will be glorious.

Until then, feel free to come back to refresh your memory on how upset you should be about what ends up happening as the Celtics careen toward one of these outcomes. Or you could just listen to your heart, with all the torturous emotional anguish that comes with it. It’s up to you!