Kyrie Irving has been publicly critical of Boston’s youth many times throughout the first half of the season. Most recently, he called out the inexperience as a contributing factor to the Celtics disappointing loss to the Orlando Magic, saying, in part, “So the things you’re doing, that you’ve done your entire career of being able to coast by in certain situations and you’ve gotten away with your youth and stuff like that, being on a championship ball club, you can’t get away with that. You see the fans going crazy. You see it gets loud. I know from the majority of the fact that we’re better than most teams in this league. It’s just going out and proving it every single night and demanding it and actually showing it.”

Irving has faced a little blowback for the comments, mostly because harping on the team’s youth has been such a common refrain for him. Even though he might have a point, the repetitive nature of the sentiment might be a bit much for the targets of his criticism to hear through the media. That appears to be part of what Jaylen Brown was saying after the loss to Brooklyn.

“We’ve just got to have each other’s backs at the end of the day,” Brown said. “We can’t make comments, we can’t point fingers. We just have to continue to empower each other and have each other’s backs. If we don’t, if we start pointing fingers, everybody’s going to go into their own little shells. We’ve got to continue to play basketball. It starts from the top to the bottom. Not from the bottom to the top but the top to the bottom. We’ve got to continue to empower each other and make the best of this. We have a lot of talent, and we know what we’re capable of doing. We have to go out there and do it. Playing free, playing loose, having fun.”

This particular rough patch is challenging Irving’s unique new role as an NBA superstar: the outright leader on a young team with high expectations. For all that Irving has done, this is new for him.

That’s the focus of a new piece on Yahoo by Vincent Goodwill. In that piece, Terry Rozier, who maybe have been Irving’s prime target in Orlando on Saturday, admitted that Irving might have a point, while adding another wrinkle of his own.

“I don’t think we’ve all been on a team like this,” Rozier told Yahoo. “Young guys who can play, guys who did things in their career, the group that was together last year, then you bring Kyrie and Hayward back, it’s a lot with it.”

When asked if the roster was too talented, Rozier didn’t back down.

“Too talented, yeah. Too talented.”

Think back to two of the most recent “Big 3′s” in the NBA. Boston’s in 2008 worked because, to Kyrie’s point, it combined veterans who had already realized their glory and big paydays, and who joined forces with a singular focus of winning a title. Miami’s Big 3 struggled out of the gate because LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh weren’t ready to fully sacrifice for each other, so it took longer for that core to figure it out.

The Boston Celtics got major contributions from Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, and Terry Rozier last season. The expectation on the outside was that each would take their steps forward and be cool with just doing a little more. The reality is that each has his own career considerations in mind as well, which is common for a young player. Former Atlanta Hawks GM Wes Wilcox relayed this telling anecdote on a recent edition of “The Woj Pod”

“I was super fortunate to work for Rick Sund, or with Rick Sund in Atlanta for a number of years and he would always say that every NBA player has natural stages to their career. We have to preface this by saying every always wants to win, but there’s like a natural transition in their career. First they want to establish they belong in the NBA, then they want a defined role, then they want to get paid, then they want accolades, they want All Stars, they want MVP’s, and then it really becomes a focus about legacy and championships. And that’s just the natural evolution of a player.”

Boston’s roster is full of guys looking for defined roles and wanting to get paid. At this point of their careers, this is natural. Rozier got a shoe deal from Puma. Tatum is debuting a new Nike shoe this week. Brown is pushing his own “Juice” clothing line. They all want to become stars in their own right. The biggest challenge for the Celtics has always been getting the youth on the team to push that aside long enough to mesh with the established stars.

The question of too much talent has lingered over this team from the beginning, and it still shows itself for long stretches. The answer for Boston lies in whether everyone on the roster can find a way to get their talent to work together rather than being too much of a good thing.