Atlanta sports fans of a certain age — scarred forever by the 1988 Eastern Conference semifinals — will always love seeing the Boston Celtics lose.
Atlantans, not accustomed to playoff moments which work out favorably for their teams, deserve this hour of celebration. They’ve been through far more than their fair share of postseason agonies.
For the rest of the NBA, however, any attempts to somehow portray Thursday night’s Game 6 loss — and elimination from the playoffs — as a legitimate disappointment for the 2016 Celtics comes across as a transparent attempt to create a sense of glee which isn’t justified by the facts.
This face might give Celtics haters reason to smile…
… but any clear-eyed and level-headed NBA observer must know that another golden age of Celtics basketball could soon emerge.
At the very least, the Celtics are going to get better before they get worse. How much better — and for how long — are the only real questions.
There’s not much to say about Game 6 or about the just-concluded Hawks series. As soon as Avery Bradley got hurt, the series didn’t necessarily end, but the playing surface was tilted to the Hawks in a big way. Atlanta had to choke away this series, and as Atlanta sports fans could tell you, that was a distinct possibility. However, when the Hawks returned home in Game 5 — thrown into a 2-2 dogfight of a series — they outscored the Celtics by 48 points over the next seven quarters.
The healthier team with home-court advantage beat the injury-ravaged team without home-court advantage. That’s not much of a news development. The Celtics were running on fumes at the end, and with Jae Crowder unable to become the player he was before his March injury, Boston essentially lacked an additional body. Crowder played, but he wasn’t the man who made Boston look so formidable (the third-best team in the East, and very possibly the second) before his season took a nasty turn.
If ever a first-round playoff loss was easy to shrug off, the Celtics offer a perfect example. They suffered from awful injury luck. Their collection of odd parts became so much greater than what previous track records suggested. Their coach, Brad Stevens, showed why he has the best chance of becoming the next generationally great NBA bench boss.
This team — with a deficient, injury-addled Crowder, not the superman pre-injury incarnation — snapped the Golden State Warriors’ home-court winning streak.
This team and this coach got Evan Turner — an unquestioned cancer for the Indiana Pacers — to play well and resurrect his career.
This team fell just one win short of getting the No. 3 seed in the Eastern Conference.
Just imagine what Boston could do with infusions of high-end talent.
Hey, guess what? We’re about to find out to a certain degree, and we could find out even more in July.
The Celtics own what will almost certainly be a top-five lottery pick, thanks to the Brooklyn Nets. They possess two other top-25 picks in the first round of the coming draft, which could serve as trade leverage if they don’t want to directly use the picks themselves.
Kevin Durant — not headed to Washington — will probably stay in Oklahoma City, and he might give Golden State a look, but if there’s one Eastern Conference destination which appears both palatable and realistic for Durant this summer, it’s Boston.
Even with Durant not in the mix, the Celtics have so much to look forward to, and the best part is that they have a coach most of the league would kill for. The roster is young. Isaiah Thomas has been molded into an All-Star-caliber performer. Some of the role players on this team will be shipped, but Boston has so many pieces to work with that it will be hard for Danny Ainge to go wrong.
Yes, the Celtics lost a first-round playoff series for the second straight year. Yet, the upward trajectory of this franchise is just beginning to come into focus. The draft lottery, the draft itself, and then the free-agent frenzy could all produce a reshaped reality in which the Celtics become top-tier contenders — possibly in 2017, certainly in 2018… and for many years to come.
If you love to laugh at the Celtics’ failures, get your jollies now.
You’re probably not going to smile very much in the future.
