There are many reasons why I love basketball, but perhaps chief among them is that it demands so much more than individual skill to do it right.

There is a sense of community and near musical harmony that must be tapped to achieve success – and success that is measured in anything other than the team collective isn’t really success at all. Most every player in the NBA could pile up a bunch of points if given greater opportunity. As Jared Sullinger’s dad, Satch, and countless other coaches are fond of pointing out, even the worst team in your league has a leading scorer and a leading rebounder.

The willingness to sacrifice for a greater goal is a requirement of winning. But it must be a shared concept built on trust, and it must spread through the playing rotation to the point where missteps are corrected from within.

The Celtics that take the training camp floor this week may have a difficult time matching the skills of those no longer here, but they can and damn well should avoid repeating the embarrassment of being less than the sum of their parts.

So while there are X’s and O’s to be mapped and schemes developed to overcome questions with interior defense, the thread that will run through all the Celtic preparation is getting people on the same page. By the end of last season, while things were generally fine with most of the individual relationships, these guys were barely in the same library during those last four games against Milwaukee.

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Shaking out the beach towel before the start of basketball season –

While those involved are loathe to take public shots when all they can see is the player’s back heading out the door, there is general relief that the club no longer has to count on Kyrie Irving for emotional consistency. But, his sublime talent aside, simply substituting All-Star Kemba Walker wouldn’t have solved everything last year. And it won’t now.

There was also the issue of some younger people trying to carve out personal NBA niches and believing they were better than they actually were after making it without Irving and Gordon Hayward to the 2018 conference finals in a weaker East. As stated here before, if they were that good, they wouldn’t have lost Game 7 at home to the Cavaliers.

But in the “be humble or get humbled” world of sport, Brad Stevens is no doubt hoping the flock comes back to the fold this year and realizes the need for each other.

And we won’t really be able to tell from Media Day.

The Celtics will show up Monday and smile for the cameras. They will take part in the video sessions that will be cut into the bits you’ll see during timeouts at the Garden.

They will talk with great optimism of the season ahead.

As Stevens put it this past week when talking about players dutifully appearing at the practice facility for offseason workout sessions and bonding, “There’s a good excitement. I think all 30 teams have that right now, and there’s a reason – because nobody has a lost a game yet.”

It will take a while for the Celtics to learn what they can do. There are issues with size, and for now it appears they will often be small at the 4-spot if they try to get their better players on the floor. Al Horford and Aron Baynes, as an entry, may be missed more than Irving because of the Kemba gain. And there’s a reason Marcus Morris had to play a lot.

This means that cohesive rotations on defense will be even more critical this year, if that’s possible. It means the Celtics must play off each other better if they hope to compete with those at the top of the conference.

Sure, Kemba Walker will at times go off at the end of games and pull the Celts’ fat from the fire, as Irving and before him Isaiah Thomas did. But for this group to win consistently will require the kind of basketball that makes the game great. The kind that people in these parts appreciate.

They’ll either see it in these Celtics, or they won’t see them for long.