The Boston Celtics won the 2024 NBA Championship, and the road there was fairly easy. A 64-win regular season was followed by a 16-3 run in the playoffs. Boston absolutely dominated the rest of the NBA, led by Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. However, national media narratives tried to tell a different story, and Netflix’s Starting 5 exposed some of them.
In reality, the Celtics were so boring that the media, especially talk shows, were forced to drum up side narratives to keep the masses interested. Nobody likes to root for Goliath. They want a David. Unfortunately, the Celtics may have been the biggest Goliaths since the Golden State Warriors' dynasty.
And Tatum fell victim to that fact.
Starting 5 exposed some insane Jayson Tatum and Celtics takes
In the second episode of Starting 5, the show flashed back to Colin Cowherd talking about Tatum and the Celtics, and he had a very bold take.
“Jayson Tatum talking about being the leader of this team. He’s not quite there yet,” said Cowherd. “I got news for you: Tatum as a one, the Celtics are never going to be special. Deep down, they have self-doubt.”
What an absolutely ridiculous statement.
Obviously, hindsight is 20/20. The Celtics hadn’t won a title then. Fast forward six months, and there was confetti lining the streets of Causeway, but Cowherd didn’t know that when he made that statement. But that doesn’t change its absolute absurdity.
At the time Starting 5 played the audio of Cowherd’s statement, the Celtics were fresh off a loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves. It was a hard-fought overtime defeat at the hands of one of the top teams in the NBA.
It was also Boston’s first loss of the season.
Cowherd's statement was made in the summer after Boston's brutal loss to the Miami Heat in the 2023 Eastern Conference Finals, but it was still a crazy thing to say.
After years of sustained success, a dominant open to the year, and two straight All-NBA First Team selections, Cowherd still decided to say the Celtics would never be special with Tatum leading the way. That goes beyond ignorance. He was simply ranting about nonsense for the sake of views.
And the craziness didn’t stop there.
In the tenth episode of Starting 5, the show looks at some media clips from the days leading up to the NBA Finals. It opens with a couple of people saying that the Celtics were the favorites but then pans to a bunch of series predictions, all of which picked the Dallas Mavericks to beat Boston.
The same Celtics team that had dominated the regular season and rolled through the East was somehow viewed as the underdog by a large population of the media.
Looking back at it all with the context that the Celtics stormed to a title makes it all a little bit funny (but still very ridiculous).
Watch Starting 5 on Netflix here.