Jayson Tatum was in full agreement with Gordon Hayward about the 2018-19 Boston Celtics that began the season with some of the best championship odds in the NBA but ended it with a one-win, second-round playoff series loss: that team wasn't it.
“That (expletive) was terrible,” Tatum said (h/t MassLive), per The Boston Globe’s Adam Himmelsbach. “You guys saw it. We’ve all talked about it. It didn’t work out how we wanted it to, and we were a very talented team but it just didn’t mesh the way we wanted it to. And that’s all right. Guys learned and everybody’s moved on from it.
“But what Gordon said was kind of right. Guys would come back from injury, guys were trying to prove themselves, like myself. I was trying to be better than I was last year, and it was just kind of a tough year.”
What Gordon Hayward said about the 2018-19 Boston Celtics
Hayward had voiced his frustrations about the 2018-19 Celtics in a far less, we'll say creative, way than Tatum did, but on the "Podcast P" show, he spoke directly to the issues that team was plagued with.
“We all had too many agendas,” Hayward told fellow NBA star Paul George on the “Podcast P” show (h/t NESN). “The agenda to win the whole thing was not the main one. Not to blame anyone, either. It’s all human nature.
"There was too many of us in the exact same position. We all needed the ball. We all rocked with the ball."
A championship with Tatum and Jaylen Brown leading the charge would be the official turning of the page on that underperforming and potentially counterintuitive team, but until that happens, it's fair to wonder if that roster set the Jays back in their ascent towards championship superstardom.