Strange days for Green Teamers
Garden full of optimism despite C’s harsh reality
The Celtics’ 2016-17 season will not end at the Garden.
It will not end at Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena.
And should the Celtics somehow lift themselves up off the canvas and take out the mighty Cavaliers and go on to meet the Western Conference powerhouse Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals, their season will not end at Oakland’s Oracle Arena, either.
The Celtics’ season ended in New York Tuesday night, and it ended, if you will, with a winning game of ping-pong. After seemingly forever being stymied whenever their latest bad season landed them in the NBA’s much-hyped draft lottery — Celtics fans still long for you, Kevin Durant — this time the Grousbeck-Pagliuca Athletic Club landed the No. 1 pick in next month’s draft.
As for that pesky business of taking on the Cleveland Cavaliers in this year’s Eastern Conference finals . . . well, yeah, there’s that. But be honest: How many times during the past two days have you heard the following:
“No matter how the Celtics do against the Cavaliers, the season is already a success!!!!”
“The Celtics are playing with house money!!!!”
Or, to quote my good pals at Comcast SportsNet New England, “Yippppppeeeeeeee!!!! Weeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!”
Have we ever had anything like this before in Boston sports history? One of our beloved big league teams is playing in the next-to-last postseason series — the series that’ll send the winner to the finals — yet there’s some buzz around town that the Garden already is closed for renovations. See you in the fall. And if you want to buy into next season’s new-and-improved Boston Celtics, call 866-4CELTIX and press 1 for information on season tickets for 2017-18.
True, not everybody is writing off the Celtics. As bad as things were during Game 1 against the defending champs Wednesday night at the Garden — LeBron James scoring 15 points in the first quarter, the Cavs jumping out to a 26-point lead in the first half — the place still was rocking when the Celts went on a 15-4 run late in the third quarter to close the gap to 92-75.
It was all a mirage, of course, as the Cavs had long since gone into cruise mode. But try telling that to the Green Teamers who packed the Garden. They knew this one already was over, but they kept up the noise.
Yet there’s that buzz … how the season already is a success, house money, blah, blah, blah.
And again, when has that ever been the attitude in a postseason series? I’m not talking about those barelymadeit- to- theplayoffs teams that snuck in through the back door and were predictably obliterated in the first round. Take, for instance, the 2014-15 Celtics. Under second-year coach Brad Stevens, they posted a 4042 regular-season record, which was good enough, barely, to qualify for the playoffs. But while the Celtics tricked out the Garden for the playoffs, and while the usual collection of local sports celebs dutifully settled into their floor seats,
everybody understood it would be a short postseason.
And it was: The Cavaliers used the series as a four-and-done limbering-up session en route to what would be the first of back-to-back showdowns against Golden State in the NBA Finals.
I know what you’re thinking: The Celtics don’t have a chance in this series against the Cavs, either.
Except that it’s the Eastern Conference finals. And when you get to the conference finals — or, in baseball parlance, the American League Championship Series — you’re supposed to have the town going nuts.
This isn’t an exercise in piety, and I’m not wringing my hands and tsk-tsking the talk-show callers who already are looking ahead to the draft instead of supporting our Men in Green. Hey, have at it.
My late brother Paul was fond of this oldie but goodie: Upsets are what make sports great. “If we didn’t have upsets,” he liked to say, “we wouldn’t have sports.” And so we had the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team at Lake Placid … the Miracle Mets of ’69 … and yes, Pats 20, St. Louis Rams 17 in Super Bowl XXXVI.
After the Celtics eliminated the Washington Wizards in the Eastern Conference semifinals a few nights back, Isaiah Thomas broke out the speech about how nobody had given his team a chance. He was quite wrong about that, of course, but … whatever. Athletes make that speech all the time. Nomar Garciaparra practically invented it.
If the Celts do somehow get back in this and topple the Clevelanders, Thomas will have every right to rinse and repeat. Because nobody is giving the Celtics a chance.
But the season already is a success. Right?